1 



■D76S 



Hollinger Corp. 
pH8.5 



- 



i 



The Boer War 






OPEN LETTER TO 




DR. CONAN DOYLE 



By 



John M. Robertson 




PHILADELPHIA 

GEORGE H BUCHANAN AND COMPANY 

418 420 422 SANSOM STREET 



By transf " 
JUL 2 1906 



/» 




THE TRUTH ABOUT THE WAR 

An Open Letter to Dr. A. Conan Doyle 

(Reprinted, with additions, from The New Age.) 



Sir : — After writing- a history of the -Boer War in 
which you described it as ended while it was in full play, 
you have thought fit to give to the world a statement of the 
general case for Great Britain against the Boers. You avow 
some diffidence as to your fitness for the task, and you well 
may. Military men have pronounced you incompetent to dis- 
cuss operations of war ; all men know how you have thought 
a war to be finished in the middle; and any careful reader 
of your History could see how little trouble you commonly 
took either to find facts or to weigh them. But in a country 
which is in large part content to take its sociology from 
Mr. Kipling, its morals from Mr. Chamberlain, and its code 
of statesmanship from Lord Milner, you may, I grant, fairly 
assume that the study of military causation is within the 
scope of the creator of Brigadier Gerard, and the imbroglio 
of a long political strife amenable to the methods which 
constructed Sherlock Holmes. 

Nay, more, unlike your co-educators, you may claim to 
have had some training in physical science, and so to have 
some potential insight into the laws of evidence. It is be- 
cause you, thus ostensibly prepared to weigh testimony and 
to reason coherently, have nevertheless produced only a re- 
arrangement of the ordinary polemic of your party, that I 
think it worth while, in the name of good morals and right 
reason, to address to you personally a criticism of your per- 
formance. The anonymous war-mongering journalist who 
speaks of himself in the plural, like a king or a deity, is out- 
side profitable discussion. We have no knowledge as to his 
acquaintance with the simplest principles of rational investi- 
gation, and can never be sure whether he is a mere mercen- 



ary or an ignoramus. You for a scientifically educated 
man; and though you are devoted to the ordinary British 
dialectic method of the bluff, you affect an engaging measure 
of candor, and claim to convince "any unprejudiced man" 
that you and your party are in the right. I propose to test 
your procedure. 

I.— BRITISH BEGINNINGS IN SOUTH AFRICA. 
Our Title Deeds. 

To begin with, you seek to prejudice your hypothetical 
unprejudiced reader by telling him that "in all the vast col- 
lection of British States there is probably not one the title- 
deeds to which are more incontestable than to" Cape Colony. 
In effect, you are here saying, however ungrammatically, that 
we have a virtually perfect title to> rule over people whom, 
by our own account, we have bought like cattle — bought, 
too, from an arbitrary prince whom we had helped to restore 
to his throne, and whom many of these people had disowned. 
Where we take land from, aborigines, you imply, our title is 
not so good. But if, say, Germany were to give six or more 
millions to Britain for New Zealand, her title would be better 
than our own now is, and the people of New Zealand would 
be exceptionally bound to give fealty to the Kaiser. I ask 
your unprejudiced reader to give heed to your moral premise. 

Whether we really "bought" the Cape from the Prince 
of Orange is all the while far from clear. Dutch students 
insist that there was no such agreement, that the sum paid 
by England was to indemnify the King of Sweden for his 
cession of the Island of Guadeloupe, and to pay for the con- 
struction of fortifications on the French frontier. Such are 
in fact the stipulations of the Convention of London, dated 
April 13, 1814, where there is no pretence that any part of 
the six millions is paid for the Dutch colonies ; and there is 
explicit testimony that Lord Castlereagh told the Dutch 
Minister : "It is for us to judge what portion of your colo- 
nies we think it expedient to keep" For it was a matter 
of keeping what we had re-taken possession of, without any 
pretence of purchase, in 1806; and our own historian, Pro- 



5 

fessor Thorold Rogers, writes : "Ceylon and the Cape of 
Good Hope were retained by the English after the war was 
over, contrary, I think, to good faith and justice." So much 
for your preliminary facts on the one hand and your intro- 
ductory ethics on the other. 

Preliminary Misrepresentations. 

But the worst of it is that your special pleading is irrele- 
vant. The question in hand is not the right of Britain to 
Cape Colony; and you have raised this merely to prejudice 
the real issue. You admit that the "title-deeds" covered 
only Cape Colony, but you proceed to insinuate that we 
relate to> the voor-trekkers who> went up country beyond the 
colony as the United States would have related to any Dutch 
New Yorkers who might, after the Revolution, have trekked 
westward and formed "new States fiercely anti- American and 
extremely anti-progressive." You are indeed a judicial ex- 
positor for the unprejudiced. You are perfectly well aware 
that ( i ) the Orange Free State once actually invited Sir 
George Grey to become its President; (2) tha*t it was one 
of the best-governed States in the world; and (3) that the 
Transvaal has made more educational progress in ten years 
than England ever made in thirty. You are further aware 
that the two Boer States set up manhood suffrage when 
England had not enfranchised her agricultural laborers ; and 
that the Transvaal put no restrictions on enfranchisement 
until there came a flood of foreigners who avowed that if 
enfranchised they would not accept the first duties of Boer 
citizenship. You know all this, and, professing to' write 
dispassionate history, you call the Boer Republics by impli- 
cation fiercely anti-British and extremely anti-progressive 
from start to finish. 

Early British Rule. 

In the same fashion, you affirm that the early British 
rule at the Cape was "mild, clean, honest, tactless, and incon- 
sistent." Either you have on this point read Theal, the 
standard historian, or you have not. If you have, you are 
aware that he expressly declares the British administration 



6 

to have become "thoroughly corrupt" by the year 1800, and 
records that even Lord Charles Somerset at times made prof- 
its out of land grants, and on horse-dealing with the Govern- 
ment. If you have not read Theal, on what ground, in the 
name of history, do you come forward to instruct the world 
in this matter? You profess to have read Mr. Methuen's 
book. The first testimony is cited there, and the references 
for others are given. If you saw fit to raise the point at all, 
how did you excuse to yourself, not merely the suppression 
of the truth before you, but the explicit substitution of the 
contrary ? 

Even where you stop short of positive invention, you 
stick at little in the way of prejudicing the ignorant reader. 
The system of rule which you call "tactless and inconsist- 
ent" included (though you are careful not to> mention it) 
the arbitrary substitution of English for Dutch in all judi- 
cial proceedings, in defiance of the pledges formerly given 
to the contrary ; and you do confess that when slavery was 
abolished, the Dutch at the Cape received only a portion of 
the compensation nominally allotted to them. In plain Eng- 
lish, they were swindled. Such is the tyranny you gloss over 
as merely "tactless and inconsistent" when British are the 
doers and Dutchmen the sufferers — you who wax frantic over 
the fiscal grievances of millionaires at Johannesburg. Need- 
less to say, you contrive to represent the Dutch as zealous 
for slavery, and the British as nobly magnanimous. You 
therefore take care to suppress the historic fact that in 1795 
the British authorities promised the Dutch that Britain would 
maintain slavery, whereas the French, who also sought to 
secure the Cape, were pledged to suppress it. 

By way of showing open-mindedness, you remark that 
"it is difficult to reach that heighth of philosophic detach- 
ment which enables the historian to deal absolutely imparti- 
ally where his own country is a party to the quarrel. But at 
least we may allow that there is a case for our adversary." 
You fully illustrate the difficulty; for your "at least" turns 
out to be an "at most." And I would like to remind you 
readers, unprejudiced or otherwise, that whereas you take 
national credit for every good official act ever done by this 



country, saying "we" did it, the good acts were mostly 
done in the teeth of the bitter and scurrilous resistance of the 
types of citizen to whom your party now appeal. Liberal- 
ism, in course of time, made some amends for "tactless and 
inconsistent" conduct by restoring Dutch law and the legal 
use of the Dutch language to Cape Colony. This policy was 
loudly denounced by the "loyalist" of that time; and now, 
forsooth, you credit the same species of empire-wrecker 
with just ground for indignation because the Transvaal did 
not grant to British immigrants as a privilege what was 
restored to the Cape Dutch as a right, of which, with his 
approval, they had been dishonorably deprived ! 

The Old Dutch Company. 

A further sample of your historical method is your as- 
sertion that in the eighteenth century the Cape Dutch had 
grown so wedded to "that independence of control and that 
detachment from Europe which has been their most promi- 
nent characteristic," that "even the mild sway of the Dutch 
Company had caused them to revolt." Your object here is to 
set up the impression that the Dutch are hereditarily mutinous 
— a species of pseudo-scientific inference which comes easily 
to a writer of your habits. Now, for former practice of 
British politicians of your type was to vilify the Dutch East 
India Company; and Theal has been at pains to show the 
injustice of much of the criticism so passed. Yet even he 
sums up his defence of the Dutch Company, in his shorter 
work, thus : 

"It governed South Africa with a view to its own inter- 
ests ; its method of paying its officials was bad ; its system of 
taxation was worse; in the decline of its prosperity it tol- 
erated many gross abuses." 

Will you venture to assert — you who< call the patient 
and constitutional protests of the Cape Dutch a "revolt"— 
that much worse can honestly be said of the regimen of 
Kruger ? 

So* much for the preambling pages in which you pre- 
pare your unprejudiced reader by giving him what you 
seem to admit is a "superficial" knowledge of South African 



8 

history down to the first annexation of the Transvaal. The 
question is, could you have given him any better knowledge ? 
Are you not in reality as superficial as you require him to be ? 
Or, to raise a question which more than once obtrudes itself 
on your better informed readers, are you capable of a mod- 
erately judicial procedure, even where the facts are fully 
before you, too plain to> be missed ? I am loth to charge on 
you what you fatuously charge on the great mass of the edu- 
cated population of the Continent — a wish to "poison the 
mind of the world." But I have read a good deal of unscru- 
pulous polemic in my time; and I am bound to say that on 
the strength of what I will presume to be mere helter-skelter 
sentiment, hand-to-mouth investigation, and general incapa- 
city for logical analysis, you reach results that wilful deceit 
could hardly advance upon. 

II.— THE TRANSVAAL QUESTION. 

British Motives. 

When you come within sight of the present troubles, 
your one-sidedness becomes frankly farcical. You gravely 
make this affirmation : "It cannot be too often pointed out 
that in this (the first) annexation, the starting point of our 
troubles, Great Britain, however mistaken she may have 
been, had no> possible selfish interest in view. There were 
noi Rand mines in those days, nor was there anything in the 
country to tempt the most covetous." This sort of thing is 
enough, I may tell you, to' make most intelligent men on 
the continent consign your pamphlet to' the waste-paper 
basket without more ado. 

You set forth with the obvious decision to make out 
every British act nobly virtuous, and at very worst "mis- 
taken" ; while every Dutch act you either directly or indi- 
rectly set down to some fault of Dutch character. Any step 
taken by a few British officials, without the slightest deliber- 
ation on the part of the mass of the nation, you grandiosely 
define as the action of "Great Britain," your ingenuous object 
being to make the nation feel committed beforehand to self- 
defence. But do you really suppose that rational foreigners 



will believe you when you pretend that official "Great Bri- 
tain" had no selfish interest in annexing the Transvaal? 
Have you the hardihood to argue that the act was an un- 
selfish one? Was there nothing to be gained from it? 
Either the land-grabbers of your adoration were fools, or you 
are paying them a very unwelcome compliment. 

To any reader who> can reason, it is unnecessary to 
point out that when men have come to regard mere extent of 
territory as a main constituent of national greatness, their 
acquisitions of territory are in terms of their own ideal su- 
premely valuable. Such is the avowed ideal of most of your 
party at the present moment. What else is the meaning of 
their parrot-phrase of "Little Englander" ? And do you 
think your opponents are simple enough to be impressed by 
your honesty when you alternately proclaim the gospel of 
expansion as the salvation of the Empire, and pretend that 
you annex vast provinces in a spirit of self-sacrificing philan- 
throphy? When we come to your treatment of the living 
question to which you thus lead up, we get taste enough of 
your logical quality, in all conscience. But do you not think 
that a closer semblance to common sense in your first chapter 
would have been, so to say, good business ? 

The Outlanders. 

As was to be expected, you drop even your bad pretence 
of impartiality when you come to the first item in the real 
dispute, to wit, the grievances of Outlanders at Johannes- 
burg. Without disguise, without decency, you play the 
part of the hired special pleader, averring that now there is 
nothing but righteousness on the British side, and nothing 
but iniquity on that of the Boers. Your discerning readers, 
prepared by your previous tactic of mock fairness, will know 
better than to suppose you can be trustworthy when you 
give full play to passion. 

Let us first consider your general case. You allege (a) 
"corruption" among the Boer officials, (b) exclusion of 
Outlanders from parliamentary and municipal franchise, (c) 
fiscal misgovernment, (d) backward sanitation, (e) corrup- 
tion and violence among the police. Some of these griev- 



10 

ances you divide and restate, so as to make them do duty 
under three heads. But they form your case. 

To begin with, I note that while you cite any scrap of 
testimony as all-sufficient to settle any point against the 
Boers, you do> not make the slightest attempt to rebut the 
very striking and quite recent testimony of an Outlander 
who has fought on the British side in this war — I mean 
Captain March-Phillips — as to the hollowness of the whole 
parade of grievances. Captain March-Phillips says — and I 
have heard other Outlanders say the same thing — that he 
and his comrades used to read with roars of laughter the in- 
flated accounts of their troubles given in English news- 
papers. Why do you not attempt to meet such evidence as 
this — you who find the most despicable and vacuous gossip 
a sufficient basis for the most sweeping generalisations 
against Transvaalers ? 

You ignore it, of course, because you cannot rebut it, 
and you know it will damage your cause even to quote it. 
Being under no such difficulty, and being concerned to put 
at least some of your readers in the way of knowing the facts 
you distort and suppress, I shall examine your statements on 
their merits. Far be it from your opponents to imitate in the 
slightest particular your tactic of bluster and evasion. To 
the grievances let us come. 

The Argument from Grievances. 

Now, even supposing your statement of grievances to 
be broadly true, it is the very wretchedest justification for a 
great war that modern times have seen, with perhaps the 
exception of the case of the war waged by the United States 
against Spain. The ruck of the party to whom you appeal 
have always execrated the French Revolution, which began 
in a peaceful effort to right wrongs a millionfold worse than 
those you allege. Further, every wrong you charge has 
been zealously inflicted and maintained in our own political 
system by the party with which you have allied yourself ; and 
the present Government contains men who for many years 
identified themselves with such measures. They refused 
every extension of franchise to classes whom they had no 



1 1 



reason to fear; they keep hundreds of thousands disfran- 
chised at this moment by an iniquitous law of registration; 
they maintain a system which heavily taxes the poor and 
spares the rich; and they have corruptly enriched by com- 
mutation of taxes the already rich classes which support 
them. If the principles you lay down were to be acted on in 
England, civil war would never cease. 

Corruption and its Causes. 

One of the most dishonest of the many dishonest de- 
vices of your party is that of pretending that "corruption" 
is something peculiar to> the late officials of the Transvaal. 
When this question was not on hand, it was normal to hear 
English Conservatives alleging that the Government of the 
United States was the most grossly corrupt in the world, ex- 
cepting perhaps those of Turkey and Russia. Yet I am 
not aware that the maddest of your war-mongers ever pro- 
posed to invade any of these countries on such a pretext. 

I will not go through the form of asking you to* reflect 
that what corruption there was at Pretoria was largely the 
work of the Outlanders. This is obvious to every man of 
intelligence who is not himself corrupted by interest or pas- 
sion. Not even you dare explicitly say that the Free State 
was corruptly governed ; and the men of the Free State are of 
the same kith and kin, creed and traditions, as the men of the 
Transvaal. If corruption arose only where there were gold 
mines, the presence of gold was. as certainly the first cause of 
the corruption as it was of the immigration of gold seekers. 
And in that corruption the Outlanders were the agents. 
An honest enquirer would say that in the circumstances 
some corruption was a moral certainty; and would confess 
that corruption would occur in such circumstances in any 
race whatever. He would admit that corruption will be 
inevitable under British administration — nay, that it began 
as soon as we occupied Pretoria. 

Finally, after the recent exposure of the financial meth- 
ods by which our own agents procure and supply horses for 
the army, he would admit that in highly civilized Great Bri- 
tian, with no gold-mining environment, there appears to 



12 

prevail at all times a corruption such as Pretoria under the 

Boers could never parallel. As you know,' it has been 
calculated that the country has been thus swindled 
out of some eight millions sterling in connection 
with this war alone. You may say that these revelations 
occurred since you wrote. But in a very early stage of the 

war there was a revelation of swindling in the matter of 
forage ; and you can hardly be ignorant that, to say nothing 
of chronic scandals of a minor order, seventeen or eighteen 
years ago there were revelations of endless swindling in the 
matter of supplies for our army in Egypt. You are also 
aware that similar corruptions were exposed in the United 
States in connection with the Cuban War; that there have 
been revelations of far-reaching official corruption in Ger- 
many in the past few years; and that in France the corrup- 
tion in connection with the Panama scheme was proved to 
be enormous. You are aware, in short, that official corrup- 
tion has occurred chronically in all States, with perhaps the 
solitary exception of the Orange Free State, and yet you are 
not ashamed to> point to the corruption caused by Europeans 
in the Transvaal as a reason why the independence of the 
Transvaal should be annihiliated. All the while, myriads of 
Englishmen take "secret commissions." 

So much for your general plea. Let us come to your 
specific pleas. 

The Perils of the Franchise. 

i. Toi take the central grievance first. Like every man 
who has written and spoken on your side, you are careful to 
suppress — save by way of post-mortem suggestions — all 
mention of the first and last reason for the withholding of a 
franchise from the multitude of Outlanders in the Transvaal. 
You are perfectly well aware that before the gold-rush there 
was no' trouble on the subject ; you may or may not be aware 
that British explorers complimented President Kruger on 
the pains he took to treat the first incomers well. But you 
never dream of acknowledging, till you are forced, that when 
they came with a rush his Government was put in a very 
grave perplexity. To begin with, numbers of those who de- 
manded the franchise avowed that they would not accept the 



13 

military duties of burghers ; and even concerning those who 
did not avow this it was morally certain that in the event 
of strife between the Transvaal and the British Empire they 
would not defend the former against the latter. As you are 
aware, one of the leading Outlanders, Mr. Lionel Phillips, 
avowed in writing the general indifference of his fellow Out- 
landers on the matter of political rights. Those who did 
want the vote sought only their own interest; not one in a 
hundred cared a straw for the welfare of the Transvaal. I 
will not ask you what you would have had President Kruger 
do. But I would ask any reader who seriously claims to> be 
capable of doing as he would be done by, whether President 
Kruger was not in a far worse dilemma than was ever faced 
by any of those English statesmen who, like Lord Salisbury, 
so long did their utmost to withhold the franchise from the 
working classes of this country, both in town and country, 
even as they now refuse Home Rule to Ireland because it is 
"disaffected." 

Insults by Outlanders. 

It is a matter of history, though you, of course, take 
care never to' mention it, that many of the Outlanders avowed 
their hope of one day seeing the British flag fly "again" over 
Pretoria. It is recorded by Mrs. Lionel Phillips that when 
President Kruger went by invitation to address a meeting of 
Outlanders, they greeted him by singing "Rule Britannia," 
and laughing at him when he called for silence. Again, when 
he went in person to receive Lord Loch at the station at Pre- 
toria, the English crowd took the horses out of the carriage, 
one man jumping- on the box and waving the Union Jack 
over the President's head. Then having drawn Lord Loch 
to his alighting-place, they left President Kruger in his 
horseless carriage. Lawless insolence could not go further ; 
and no State in the world would grant its franchise to aliens 
who thus publicly insulted its chief ruler. In some countries 
they would have been fired upon by the State troops. But 
you, suppressing all mention of these insults, and vending 
a gross fable on the other side, think fit to taunt Kruger with 
having visited Johannesburg only thrice in nine years. 



You have further the effrontery to charge on the Boers 
"despotic government in the matter of the Press and of the 
right of public meeting." I content myself with saying (a) 
that in no country in the world is such license of alien insult 
and sedition tolerated as was long permitted to the Out- 
lander journal in Johannesburg; (b) that nowhere, as you 
very well know, would such meetings have been tolerated 
as there took place; and (c) that our own rule in India is a 
thousandfold less tolerant of the semblance of sedition than 
was the government of the Transvaal. 

These, observe, are still subsidiary issues. The great 
question, on which posterity will pronounce, is, Who forced 
the Wart and to that we have yet to come. In the meantime 
I go on with your grievances. 

Sanitation and Police. 

I know little in the way of war-mongering rant that will 
compare with your two grievances : "Watercarts instead of 
pipes; filthy buckets instead of drains/' The latter clause, 
indeed, belongs to another category than rant. If you made 
any use of your eyes when you were in South Africa, you 
are aware that the bucket system is the universal sewage- 
method in the inland towns of our own colonies; and that 
so great are the difficulties of drain-sewage even at the coast 
that there are constant complaints against the drainage of 
Cape Town. What then was your purpose, or what is your 
excuse, for this allusion to "filthy buckets"? Do you set 
any limit either to the simplicity of your readers, or to* your 
own misguidance of them ? 

What you say of "a corrupt and violent police" is no 
less grossly misleading. The whole outcry of the Outlander 
on this score resolves itself into citation of the Edgar case; 
and he who, after reading the details of that, pronounces it a 
just ground of international remonstrance, is not to be ar- 
gued with. Even if it were a miscarriage of justice, it would 
be on a par with hundreds of episodes that occur among our- 
selves, where charges of violence against the police have been 
made a thousand times, and charges of corruption against 
them are privately current at all periods. But the Edgar 



15 

case offers no good ground whatever for denunciation of 
the Transvaal system. And you are probably as well aware 
as I that while you allege "a high death-rate in what should 
have been a health resort," the Outlanders themselves con- 
stantly spoke of Johannesburg as the healthiest town in 
South Africa. Mrs. Lionel Phillips testifies that it was 
never visited by an epidemic. 

The Liquor Laws. 

Perhaps your crowning stroke in this connection, how- 
ever, is your categorical mention of "the liquor laws, by 
which the Kaffirs were allowed to be habitually drunk." 
You will not be surprised at my calling this an impudent 
fable ; you know as well as I that your words are rant. But 
when you speak of "laws by which" the Kaffirs were allowed 
to get drunk, you pass from rant to something worse. All 
men in South Africa know the enormous difficulty of pre- 
venting illicit traffic in liquor. In our own army there, it is 
visibly the constant preoccupation of the officers ; and I have 
myself seen endless evidences of their difficulties. But as 
regards Johannesburg there is the express testimony of 
many Outlanders that strenuous attempts were made there 
to enforce the stringent Liquor Law of 1896. One Ameri- 
can Outlander with whom I had many conversations, and 
who always maintained against me that the war was inevit- 
able, emphatically assured me that the Liquor Law was as 
well administered as it could be — that nothing short of the 
compound system could do better. So much for your false 
witness. 

British Liquor Laws. 

It remains to note the fashion in which you play up to 
British hypocrisy. You are as well aware as the rest of us 
that in our own country all effectual legislation for the con- 
trol of the liquor traffic is prevented by the political alliance 
between the Conservative party and the Drink Trade. Thus 
the political party which you have joined does wilfully facil- 
itate the drink traffic, in the pecuniary interest of its most 



i6 

influential section; and you dare nevertheless to< formulate 
against the late Transvaal Government the nakedly false 
charge of making "laws by which the Kaffirs were allowed 
to be habitually drunk." Is it wonderful that other nations 
calls ours the champion hypocrite of the world ? You prate 
of the discredit brought on England by pro-Boer accusations. 
Do you think they can do England half the harm done by 
your Tartu fe airs and nefarious fictions ? 

I have done with your list of grievances. They are of 
a piece with the rest of your polemic — a tissue of the most 
reckless special pleading current in the war-mongering press. 

Boer and British Theology. 

Of this you yourself seem to be conscious. After you 
have put the case as one-sidedly as ever a case was put, you 
allow yourself to reflect that such special pleading must dis- 
credit itself with intelligent men, and you observe that "it 
is a poor case which cannot bear to fairly state and honestly 
consider the case of its opponents." Well, yours is a poor 
case enough, and in the end, therefore, you neither fairly 
state nor honestly consider the case of the Boers, Before 
venturing even on that final pretence of stating the other 
side, you are careful to cite some reports which show that 
some of the Boers still hold the theological opinions which 
were normal in this country a generation ago. Some of 
them, as you show, believed some years since (you do not 
say how many years) that locusts were a divine plague to be 
prayed against, not to< be fought by secular means. If you 
know anything of British culture-history you know that in 
the middle of the nineteenth century whole religious denomi- 
nations in this country took that view of all pestilences, and 
denounced as impious those who thought otherwise. Ra- 
tional clergymen were ostracised in England and Scotland 
for opposing the majority. Yet you are not ashamed to 
make the survival of such theology in a remote and pastoral 
population a reason for treating it as a hindrance to civiliza- 
tion that must be swept away. 

The worst of it is that you are fully aware of the essen- 
tial identity of the Boer theology with what is professed 



17 

among- the insincere and dissembling multitude to which 
you appeal. What is the difference, pray, between popular 
British theology and that of the Boers? The "imperial" 
Parliament opens its every meeting with prayer ; and premier 
and monarch always profess to invoke "the blessing of Al- 
mighty God" on their acts. All alike claim to found their 
creed on the Hebrew Bible. The difference is that your 
party are in the main shameless humbugs in such matters, 
and the Boers as a rule are not. Such is the hypocrisy of 
many of your collaborators that they will in one breath de- 
ride the Boers for their creed, and in the next glorify Crom- 
well and their Puritan forefathers for acting on the very 
same beliefs. Nay, you yourself tell us, on your own part, 
that when the Boers invoked "the Lord as the final arbiter, 
Britain was ready, less obtrusively but no less heartily, to 
refer the quarrel to the same dread judge." So that in your 
theology the deity ignores plagues, but gives close judicial 
supervision to wars ! You are indeed a pretty philosopher to 
criticise the ignorant Boer ! 

In the last-quoted sentence you virtually deny the noto- 
rious fact that on the British side the troops were prayed 
over, the flags blessed, and "the Lord invoked as the final 
arbiter" in ten thousand pulpits. And the effect of your 
polemic, to your shame be it said, is to teach a mindless mul- 
titude that they do well to make war on the Boer nation 
because some Boers avow exactly the opinions in which most 
Britians were solemnly brought up a generation, ago. Stand- 
ing aloof as I do from such theological views at home as 
well as abroad, I take this opportunity to testify that in 
my opinion you stain the cause of reason even more than you 
disgrace that of religion by your miserable appeals to the 
mere conceit of a crowd who are neither rational nor honestly 
religious, who have never thought out a single theological 
problem, and who are base enough to persecute in one decade 
fellow-citizens that courageously oppose theological dogmas, 
and in the next to make war on a remote community be- 
cause it partly holds by such dogmas still. 



i8 



Boer Politics. 



Perhaps you will here resort afresh to' the interesting 
sophism implied in one of your sentences. "There was not 
a wrong," you say, in your slovenly style, "which had driven 
the Boer from Cape Colony which he did not now practice 
himself upon others — and a wrong may be excusable in i#J5 
which is monstrous in 1895" All wrongs done by England 
are of course excusable: "Caesar doth never wrong but with 
just cause." And all wrongs done by Boers are, equally, of 
course, monstrous. Educated England, you may say, was 
excusable for believing collectively in prayer against rinder- 
pest and cholera as late as 1865 ; while the Transvaal is an 
insufferable obstacle to civilization because a minority of 
back-veld Boers still thought so as late as 1895. So be it: 
carry your catch-penny sociology as far as you will. But I 
cannot let pass with mere derision your pretence that the 
Boers in the Transvaal were doing in 1895 what had been 
done to them in 1835. You are here, as so often before, 
utterly falsifying the whole ethic of the political issue. The 
Dutch who trekked out of Cape Colony did so because the 
incoming English had broken their solemn pledges to respect 
the Dutch laws, and had officially robbed the Dutch to boot. 
The Cape had been Dutch to begin with : the English were 
the incomers. In the Transvaal, the Boers were on their own 
ground, and the incomers had neither more nor less right 
than an Englishman has who goes to make money for a few 
years in France or Germany. To say that the Boers were 
acting as the British had done at the Cape is sheer perversion. 
They were acting as France and Germany act by aliens at 
this moment. 

The Dutch had been settled, as they hoped, for ever at 
the Cape. The Outlanders of Johannesburg, in nine cases 
out of ten, had not the remotest idea of settling in the Trans- 
vaal. Yet whereas the Boers, knowing this, hesitated to give 
them a vote which, as you admit, they might use to enforce 
"a policy abhorrent to the original owners of the land," you 
prate of unrighteousness and wrong! One of the parrot- 
cries of your party runs on the "hypocrisy" of the Boers; 



19 

another on their "slimness." You have successfully shown 
that in whatever respect they may excel .us, we are their 
masters in the departments in question. 

Gold-Mining versus Civilization. 

After you have made your pleasing pretence that "it is 
a poor case which cannot afford to fairly state and honestly 
consider the case of its opponents/' you represent the Boers 
as saying of the Outlanders: "if they stayed, let them be 
thankful that they were tolerated at all." Such is the final 
measure of your fairness and honesty. You then go* on to 
say that "a policy of Thibet" cannot be tolerated "in a great 
tract of country which lies right across the main line of in- 
dustrial progress." 

I am not surprised to find you speaking of gold-mining 

as part of "the main line of industrial progress." That 
medieval delusion, long since exploded by economic science, 
is cherished by men from whom one might more reasonably 
expect economic knowledge than from you. Knowing that 
all gold-mining is transient, and that according to expert 
calculations the Witwatersrand mines may well be exhausted 
within twenty years, some of them yet talk of vicious Johan- 
nesburg as a kind of fortress of civilization. The Boers, 
knowing as much, had tenfold reason for hesitating to en- 
franchise the multitude of hostile aliens whose cause you 
espouse. 

But that is by the way ; as is the answer to your asser- 
tion that the Johannesburgers were "far more highly edu- 
cated and progressive than the Boers." If there were any 
Outlanders more highly educated than Smuts, Boer official 
and distinguished Oxford graduate, they are unfortunately 
unknown to fame; and as to "progressiveness," it happens 
that the labor laws of the Transvaal were all round con- 
siderably better than those of England are at this moment. 
Whether you knew this or not is of little importance; if 
you had known it you would have taken care not to mention 
it. With or without knowledge, you always contrive to 
put the case otherwise than "fairly and honestly." 



20 

III.— THE PLEA FOR BRITISH AGGRESSION. 

The essential point, however, is this. You here indi- 
cate plainly enough that in your opinion Britain was justi- 
fied in forcing war on the Boers, as obstacles to< "industrial 
progress." Unless you thought so, your reasoning was irrel- 
evant. That, of course, it often is ; but I am bound to assume 
that you are always driving at something; and this is your 
drift here. You go on to ask, concerning the Boers, "What 
is their right" to "hold down" the Outlanders "in a way 
which exists nowhere else upon earth"? Here, of course, 
you pass from misrepresentation to absurd untruth. You 
are perfectly aware that in our Indian Empire nobody has 
any franchise rights; also> that there are no Parliaments in 
Russia and Turkey; also that in no country whatever are 
aliens allowed the franchise save on their becoming natural- 
ized and undertaking to bear absolute allegiance to the State 
that enfranchises them. 

All this romancing is in your ordinary spirit. But you 
further answer your own question in these words: "The 
right of conquest" — yet another untruth, for the Boers 
neither had nor pretended to> have conquered the Outlanders 
— and you add : "Then the same right may be justly invoked 
to reverse so intolerable a situation" That is to say, you 
allege that Britain had a clear right to conquer and annex 
the Transvaal because the Boers would not concede the 
whole of our demands as to franchise. Now let us see how 
you relate this claim to your further account of the origins 
of the war. 

The Outlanders' Petition. 

Coming to the question of the negotiations, you take 
care to parade the ex parte statement of the Outlanders' peti- 
tion. You take care to say nothing as tx> how the 21,000 
signatures to> that veracious document were obtained ; noth- 
ing of the abundant evidence as to the gross corruption 
employed. You cite a corruptly engineered petition as a 
valid testimony to corruption on the other side; and you 
reproduce its mention of the breaking-up of a meeting with- 



21 

out a hint that the Outlander meetings were nakedly sedi- 
tious. All the while, like the other "gentlemen" of your 
party, you placidly contemplate the breaking up of peace 
meetings in Great Britain. 

British Disinterestedness. 

By way, too, of express prelude to your chapter on "The 
Negotiations" you pen a paragraph which begins : "The 
British Government and the British people do not desire any 
direct authority in South Africa." This egregious assertion 
you justify by the further statement that "The Transvaal as 
a British province would have its own legislature, its own 
revenue, its own expenditure, and its own tariff against the 
mother country." Tariff on what? What products have 
you the ingenuity to represent as likely to be protected in the 
Transvaal by a tariff against British competition? You 
either know perfectly well that there are none, or you have 
never give a thought to the subject. Your flourish on this 
head is either an expression of folly on your own part or an 
attempt to trade on folly in others. 

As against your theory of disinterestedness, let us now 
consider the essential financial facts. 

1. Many Britons held shares in Tranvaal gold mines. 

2. They were vehemently assured that if the Boer sys- 
tem of government could be upset the profits of the mines 
would be greatly increased, (a) by lessened taxation, and 
( b ) by forcing native labor into the mines. 

3. Many Britons were similarly assured that British 
commerce with a British Transvaal would be greatly multi- 
plied. 

These facts are perfectly notorious. And they reduce 
your pretence of disinterestedness to the level of burlesque. 
But another clinching disproof of your own pretence lies in 
your own previous words. In the previous chapter you had 
averred that the Boer system lay "right across the main 
line of industrial progress." Now you allege that Britain 
had nothing to gain commercially from annexation. You 
doubtless know better than I how far a man may trade on the 



22 

imbecility of Jingo readers. But is it prudent thus to as- 
sume that the rest of the nation, and the mass of European 
readers, can be duped by such coarse, duplicity as this? 

CONAN VERSUS DOYLE. 

Another of your attempts to> prove the disinterestedness 
of the Johannesburg capitalists is the statement that, in such 
a community, where the franchise is given, "The new-comer 
soon becomes as proud of his country and as jealous of her 
liberty as the old." Here again you badly overreach your- 
self; for on the previous page you had made the admission 
that, from the Boer point of view, "it was only a question of 
time before the newcomers would dominate the Raad and 
elect their own President, who< might adopt a policy abhor- 
rent to the original owners of the land" ; and this view, you 
confess, was "tenable in theory." You can object only that 
the Boer Position was "unjust and impossible in practice." 
That is not the point for the present. The point is that you 
can hardly write two pages without contradicting yourself. 

In point of fact, all men knew that if the franchise were 
once given, the great majority of Out lander votes would be 
coerced by the capitalist interest, and the Government worked 
in that interest only. Let any man who' knows Kimberley 
tell you how British institutions work there. Body and soul, 
the population is in the hands of the De Beers Company. 
Your friends the capitalists simply sought to- duplicate the 
De Beers regime at Johannesburg. 

Mr. Rhodes. 

But the impossibility of getting a decently judicial view 
on such matters from you is made by your treatment of 
Mr. Rhodes. A writer in your position, if he retained any 
keen sense of self-respect and of literary honor, would at 
least go as far as some sections of the war press have gone, 
and pass an ostensibly impartial censure on Mr. Rhodes. 
But you honey your voice as soon as you approach him. 
You gingerly intimate that "The motives of his action are 
obscure — certainly we may say that they were not sordid, 
for he has always been a man zvhose thoughts were large 



23 

and whose habits were simple." A Daniel come to judg- 
ment! The desire for extension of empire is to pass for 
large-thoughtedness with Mr. Rhodes, and for infamy when 
ascribed to Mr. Kruger ! And Mr. Rhodes, forsooth, cannot 
be sordid because his habits are simple ; while the consider- 
ably simpler habits of Mr. Kruger serve to make him the 
chosen target of the satire of the British snob, to whom you 
appeal, and on whose vote your party relies. All the while, 
Mr. Rhodes possesses the most palatial house in South 
Africa; and you call his habits simple because he is not al- 
ways in it, but attends to business elsewhere. And all the 
while, too, you are aware that Mr. Rhodes deliberately de- 
ceived Sir Hercules Robinson in regard to the preparations 
for the Raid. 

The Plot for Annexation. 

It is after such an exhibition of judicial method, fair- 
ness, competence, coherence, and veracity, that you reach 
the burning question of "The Negotiations," And here, 
after your preamble on British disinterestedness, you 
squarely affirm that "There could be no question of a plot 
for the annexation of the Transvaal. * * * One may 
examine the files of the press during all the months of nego- 
tiations and never find one reputable opinion in favor of such 
a course, nor did one in society ever meet an advocate of 
such a measure." I confess to some difficulty in meeting an 
assertion so worded. You yourself have just been under- 
taking to show that we had a perfect right to conquer the 
Transvaal ; now you say no reputable person before the war 
suggested its conquest. Was it then disreputable to affirm 
an obvious right? As it happens, opinions in favor of an- 
nexations were repeatedly put forward, both during and be- 
fore the negotiations, in journals and magazines which 
commonly pass for being as reputable as yourself. I have 
also' seen the view urged in a novel by a popular author. I 
will not seek to put you in the delicate position of saying 
whether you do not admit that author to be reputable, and I 
will not make the still more delicate attempt to decide be- 
tween your status and that of the periodicals I refer to. But 



24 

I take leave to affirm, with emphasis, that before and during 
the negotiations the tone of many journalists and other 
writers wholly in favor of annexation; and in some sec- 
tions of society (in which I cannot pretend to move) the 
view was quite familiar. I leave it to you to asperse such 
society as disreputable if you will; but I suggest, in your 
own interest, that you had better not. And on the general 
problem, I would advise you to consult Mr. Rider Haggard, 
who is surely a reputable writer, and very much on your own 
literary and intellectual plane. 

In the meantime, a few dated citations from the leading 
British journal will serve to exhibit the value of your testi- 
mony : — 

"The gibes and grumblings * * * have only served 
to remove the last lingering hesitation on the part of the 
people generally with regard to a resort in case of necessity 
to armed force, with the object of delivering the Outlanders 
from a monstrous condition of servitude." — Times, August 
12, 1899. 

"This country would have been entirely within its right 
in taking and acting upon its own view of the franchise 
law without more ado." * * * "Our colonies are en- 
thusiastic in their support, and will supply contingents of an 
exceedingly useful kind. * * * A struggle which this 
country has done everything to avoid will put an end forever 
to the domination of the Boer oligarchy." — Times, August 
15, 1899. 

"The regular troops at present in South Africa together 
with the irregular levies at the disposal of the military au- 
thorities, would be fully equal to cope with any force the 
Boers could put into the field." — Times, August 16, 1899. 

"When the reinforcements now under orders have 
reached South Africa, they will raise the number of our 
troops there to about 23,000 men, a force which ought to be 
at least sufficient to secure our colonial frontiers against 
incursion." — Times, September 9, 1899. 

"The despatch" (Mr. Chamberlain's) "is not necessary- 
ily an ultimatum, but it is clearly the prelude to an ultimatum 



should the reply prove to be unfavorable." — Times, Septem- 
ber 14, 1899. 

Finally, a week before the presentation of the Boer ulti- 
matum, we have from the same organ the most explicit 
avowal of the aggressive purpose of the British Govern- 
ment : — 

"Preparations are being steadily made * * * for 
placing such an army in the field as will ensure that when 
we take the offensive, our operations shall be rapid and de- 
cisive. — Times, October 2, 1899. 

I do' not trouble you with citations from that extensive 
section of the press of your party which is popularly termed 
"yellow." I leave it to those of your readers whose memo- 
ries may fail them, to surmise how the Daily Mail expressed 
itself when the Times declaimed as above. But it may be 
well to put down once more in black and white the fact which 
you and your party either shiftily ignore or shamelessly deny, 
that in September of 1899 the bulk of the British public was 
avowedly bent on a war of aggression. When a mass meet- 
ing was held at Manchester on September 15th — three weeks 
before the issue of the Boer ultimatum — Mr. Morely and 
Mr. Courtney, the leading speakers, were shouted at for 
pleading against such a war. And when Mr. W. T. Stead 
issued a pamphlet dated September 21st, 1899, having just 
returned from the Hague, where the representatives of the 
Powers had been striving to preserve the peace of the world, 
he wrote : "I find my own country ringing from end to end 
with preparations for war." 

It is significant of the present state of political morals 
and intelligence among your party that in the face of all this 
your press should now dare to pretend that "we never sought 
war: it was they who invaded us." Your party may indeed 
well wish to suppress the facts. But I take leave to press 
them on the attention of your "impartial" readers by way 
of preparation for a study of your account of the Negotia- 
tions. 



2 ) 

IV.— THE NEGOTIATIONS. 

It is characteristic of your method of proof that you 
cannot even begin a description of the Negotiations without 
asserting that Sir Alfred Milner had the record "of an able 
clear-headed man, too just to be either guilty of or tolerant 
of injustice." Thus do you bring your pleading at every 
turn to the plane of claptrap. The whole political machinery 
of our country proceeds on the certainty that no man can 
be pronounced "too just to be either guilty of or tolerant of 
injustice." In every dispute between parties since party 
government began, each side has charged the other with 
injustice. Every leading statesman in our own day has been 
so impugned. It is only when they stand collectively in the 
relation of suzerainty to other races that Englishmen dream 
of pretending that any statesman is incapable of injustice. 
And you undertake, forsooth, to bestow that certificate in 
advance on a man who, before he went to< South Africa, had 
never been in a position to govern either justly or unjustly! 

Your chapter on the Negotiations is worthy of its pre- 
amble. It is the most chaotic section of a disorderly book; 
and no man could gather from it even a moderately clear 
notion of the course of events. You affect to take up the 
narrative and then drop it five times over, always interpos- 
ing paragraphs of declamation in which you reiterate asper- 
sions you have already made or introduced new aspersions, 
always covering the subject with a dust-cloud of passionate 
rhetoric. Once, on a holiday, I read a story of yours, en- 
titled, "Rodney Stone." You had apparently planned that it 
should be an account of Rodney Stone's adventures. But 
you never reached them. You kept him describing other 
people's adventures till the book was finished, and you might 
as well have called the story "Conan Doyle." It would 
appear that your pen, and not your purpose, determines the 
construction of your narrative. The story of Rodney Stone 
has still to be written, and as far as you are concerned the 
same may be said of the history of the Transvaal dispute. 



27 

Synopsis of the Dispute. 

What are main facts ? In the interests of your readers, 
I state them in chronological order. 

1896, January 7. — Immediately after the Raid Mr. 
Chamberlain proposed to send a large force to the Cape "to 
provide for all eventualities," but was dissuaded by Sir Her- 
cules Robinson. He then invited President Kruger to give 
Johannesburg complete Home Rule, and on Kruger's re- 
fusal sent a menacing letter which evoked protests from the 
Ministers of Natal and from the majority of the Cape Legis- 
lature. 

August 12. — Mr. Chamberlain declared in the House 
that the British Government was pledged not to interfere in 
the internal affairs of the Transvaal. 

1897, March. — The two Boer Republics conclude a 
treaty of defensive alliance, leaving ultimate freedom of de- 
cision to each State. 

May. — Immediately after Sir Alfred Milner's arrival 
at the Cape, the Transvaal Government proposes arbitration 
with regard to all points in dispute touching the Convention. 

July. — The Raid Enquiry Committee report that Mr. 
Rhodes had "deceived the High Commissioner representing 
the Imperial Government," also his colleagues and subordi- 
nates. Speaking on the Report in the House, Mr. Chamber- 
lain declares himself "perfectly convinced" that "there exists 
nothing- which affects Mr. Rhodes' personal character as a 
man of honor." 

October. — Mr. Chamberlain refuses to arbitrate, af- 
firming that "her Majesty's Government maintains the Pre- 
amble of the 1 88 1 Convention" — that is, the Convention 
which had been expressly supplanted by that of 1884, in con- 
sideration of sacrifices of territory confessedly made to 
secure the abolition of "suzerainty." 

1898, February. — Mr. Kruger re-elected for the fourth 
time, by a vast majority. 

April. — Mr. Rhodes re-instated as Managing Director 
of the Chartered Company. 

September. — Mr. Rhodes and his party defeated in 
the General Election for the Cape Parliament. The Dutch 



28 

party in power, with an English premier, and two English 
and three Dutch colleagues in his Cabinet. One of their 
first acts is to vote an annual subsidy of £30,000 to the Royal 
Navy. 

December. — Mr. Chamberlain insists afresh that the 
Preamble of the 1881 Convention subsists. Sir A. Milner 
visits England. 

1899, January. — The Cape Ministry protests to> Sir A. 
Milner that the "South African League" is doing its worst 
to' promote bad feeling. Sir William Butler similarly warns 
Mr. Chamberlain against the League's statements, 

March. — Sir A. Milner, again at his post, pretends 
that an anti-British movement has begun among the Dutch 
throughout South Africa. His whole proof is an anonymous 
and non-seditious letter in an obscure paper, published in the 
far north of the Colony. (In 1897 he had testified to the 
marked loyalty of the whole Cape population. ) 

May. — Milner, in a cablegram to Chamberlain, calls 
for a "striking proof" of the British Government's inten- 
tion "not to be ousted from its position in South Africa," 
declaring that in the Transvaal thousands of British sub- 
jects are "kept permanently in the position of helots," and 
that "the case for intervention is overwhelming." Chamber- 
lain formally replies, stating grievances, and declaring that 
Britain as the "paramount power" must now intervene, but 
suggests that Milner should meet Kruger. Milner replies, 
deprecating the British claim of "suzerainty" but insisting 
that the Transvaal's claim; to be a "sovereign international 
State" (though accompanied by the full admission of the 
specified rights guaranteed to< Britain by the Convention of 
1884) is "in the nature of a defiance." Next day, Mr. Gos- 
chen publicly testifies to the loyalty of the Cape Dutch. 

June i. — Conference between Milner and Kruger at 
Bloemfontein, It lasts only five days. Describing the nego- 
tiations in a long despatch of June 14, Milner writes that in 
part of the discussion he had been thinking of "the remote 
contingency of our being able to come to an amicable settle- 
ment.^ That is to' say, he had gone into the Conference ex- 
pecting it to fail. His demands had been : ( 1 ) A five years' 



2 9 

residence to secure the franchise : the law to be retrospective ; 
(2) modification of the oath of naturalisation; (3) a fair 
representation for the newly enfranchised. 

-Kruger proposed (1) two years' residence to secure 
naturalization, five years more to secure the full franchise; 
but all settled in the country before 1890 to receive the vote 
in 1 90 1 ; (2) a larger representation for the Outlanders; (3) 
a property qualification for the franchise of £150, or occupa- 
tion of a £50 house, or an income of £200; (4) the claim- 
ant to give proofs of having possessed civic rights elsewhere ; 
(5) the oath to be similar to that used in the Orange Free 
State; (6) all these proposals to be subject to British accept- 
ance of the principle of arbitration. 

Milner pronounced the franchise proposals to be insuf- 
ficient; and refused to agree to foreign arbitration. Kruger, 
however (June 5), suggested an African tribunal. On that 
the Conference ended. Kruger thereupon introduced in the 
Raad a Reform Bill, decreeing ( 1 ) a seven years' qualifica- 
tion for the franchise, dropping the fourth of the above-cited 
stipulations; (2) enfranchisement at once all who had re- 
sided nine years, and requiring only five years more from 
those who had been two years in the country; (3) enfran- 
chising all adult sons-of-aliens born in the State; and (4) 
increasing the representation of the gold fields by four 
members in each Volksraad. 

[This Reform Bill (passed July 19) was not held ac- 
ceptable by Lord Salisbury's Government. Already at the 
close of the Conference the Intelligence Department had 
issued its "Military Notes," telling how war should be waged 
in the Transvaal. At the same time Lord Wolseley laid be- 
fore the English Government a plan for the invasion and con- 
quest of the two Republics.] 

July 18. — The Cape Government declares its conviction 
"that no ground whatever exists for active interference in the 
internal concerns" of the Transvaal. 

July 20. — The Uitlander Council at Johannesburg tele- 
graphs to declare its disappointment at the report that the 
British Government is inclined to accept the seven years' 
franchise. 



3° 

July 2j. — -Mr. Chamberlain, in a despatch, admits that 
the new law is an improvement, but re-asserts the claim to 
"suzerainty" on the ground of the annulled Convention of 
1881 and declines foreign arbitration, vaguely suggesting 
some "judicial authority." 

August i. — He proposes a new Joint Enquiry. 

August 15. — The British Agent at Pretoria told the 
State Secretary there that "the only chance for the South 
African Republic Government zvas an immediate surrender 
to the Bloemfontein Minimum" ; and that "her Majesty's 
Government, who had given pledges to the Uitlanders, would 
be bound to assert their demands and, if necessary, to press 
them by force." (C. 9521, p. 45.) 

August 19 and 21. — Kruger, explaining that he did 
not thereby refuse the proposed Joint Enquiry, offered a five 
years 3 franchise, with eight new seats in the Volksraad, 
making 10 seats out of 36, on condition that ( 1 ) the British 
Government should not further interfere; (2) the "suzer- 
ainty" claim should be tacitly dropped; and (3) arbitration 
should be conceded when the new law had been passed. 

August 23. — Milner in a despatch admits that the new 
proposals are "as liberal as anything I was prepared to sug- 
gest," but argues that other claims must be met. 

August 25. — The Uitlander Council and the South 
African League declare that the franchise reform will not 
suffice, and demand various "reforms," including "disarma- 
ment of the Boer population and demolition of the forts." 

August 26. — Mr. Chamberlain, in a speech to a garden- 
party at his house, said : "Mr. Kruger dribbles out reforms 
like water from a squeezed sponge; and he either accom- 
panies his offers with conditions which he knows to impos- 
sible, or he refuses to 1 allow us to make a satisfactory investi- 
gation of the nature and character of these reforms. * * * 
The sands are running down in the glass. * * * The 
knot must be loosened, or else we shall have to find other 
ways of untying it." 

August 28. — He sends an ungracious message (which 
he afterwards professed to regard as a "qualified accept- 
ance") construed by the Boers and everybody else as a re- 



3i 

fusal. It wantonly re-asserted the claim to suzerainty under 
the annulled Convention. One the same day the Cape Pre- 
mier declared : "We feel that war would be wrong- * * * 
it would be an offence against civilization." 

August 31. — Milner telegraphed to Chamberlain : "The 
purport of all representations made to me is to urge prompt 
and decided action. * * * British South Africa is pre- 
pared for extreme measures : * * * there will be a 
strong reaction against the policy of her Majesty's Govern- 
ment if matters drag." 

September 2. — The Transvaal Government, regretting 
the refusal of its last offers, which were dependent on con- 
ditions, reverts to its former offer; but the Raad agrees 
to accept the proposed Joint Enquiry, provided this is not to 
be made a precedent for future intervention. 

September 7. — British troops being massed near the 
Transvaal frontiers, the Boer State Secretary asks for infor- 
mation as to the purpose. Milner replies : "I do not know 
what the State Secretary refers to," adding, however, that 
the troops "are here to protect British interests and to pro- 
vide against eventualities." He makes no pretence that the 
Boers are arming. 

September 8. — The British Government decide to send 
10,000 men to Natal. The Transvaal Government offers to 
revert to the Joint Enquiry. Mr. Chamberlain replies to 
their previous message, that he would accept the previous 
proposals "taken by themselves" — that is, without the con- 
ditions annexed; and intimates that if this is not agreed to, 
H. M. Government "reserve to> themselves the right to recon- 
sider the situation de novo, and to formulate their own 
proposals for a final settlement" (that is, to send an ultima- 
tum). 

September 15. — Sir W. Hely Hutchinson, Governor 
of Natal, in a despatch to Mr. Chamberlain, proposes the 
invasion of the Transvaal, though the Natal Ministry object. 

September 16. — The Transvaal Government appeal to 
the British Government to abide by its own proposal for a 
Joint Commission, and decline to let their intermediate pro- 
posals stand without the conditions annexed. 



32 

September 19. — Milner notifies President Steyn of in- 
tention to station British troops near borders of Free State, 
but calls upon the State to preserve strict neutrality. Steyn 
replies next day that his burghers are likely to take alarm; 
and puts responsibility on the British Government. 

September 20. — Mr. Hayes Fisher, Junior Lord of 
the Treasury, in a public speech, says: "The sand has run 
through the glass for Paul Kruger." * * * "The Gov- 
ernment must now send a sufficient force to insure that when 
the final ultimatum is presented" the Boers will perhaps 
"listen to* the voice of reason and not * * * invite us 
to inflict on them a crushing defeat and take from them the 
country they so much cherish/' 

September 22. — The mobilization of an Army Corps 
for South Africa is announced. 

September 27. — The Free State Volksraad protest that 
"there exists no cause for war," but declare that if it be 
forced they will stand by their alliance with the Transvaal. 

September 28. — Announcement made that a large con- 
tingent of the corps will be at once sent to South Africa. 

September 30. — Transvaal State Secretary courteously 
appeals, through Milner, for an answer as to the British 
Government's decision. 

October i. — Mr. Chamberlain replies: "The despatch 
is being prepared : it will be some days before it is ready." 
Yet the Duke of Devonshire in a public speech declares that 
the apprehensions o>f the Boers are "absolutely unfounded." 

October 7. — The Royal Proclamation summons Par- 
liament for October 17, calls out a part of the Reserves; 
and orders are given to mobilize a field force for South 
Africa. 

October 9. — President Steyn telegraphs to> Milner a 
last appeal for a mutual agreement to withdraw forces. 

The Transvaal Government presents its ultimatum to 
the British Agent at Pretoria. 

October ii. — The Boers invade Natal, whose Gov- 
ernor had four weeks before proposed to invade the Trans- 
vaal. 



33 

More Falsifications. 

Such is the true history of the diplomacy of the quarrel, 
from the Raid to the outbreak of war, put into less space 
than you have devoted to a pastiche of declamation which 
supresses the most essential truths, and either suggests or 
affirms a series of untruths. You assert (p. 49) that when 
Mr. Chamberlain made his speech about the sands running* 
down, he and the British public had vainly "waited week 
after week for an answer." I have shown above that this 
is a shameful misrepresentation. Mr. Chamberlain's grossly 
provocative speech was made within a week of the receipt of 
President Kruger's most important and most conciliatory 
offer, to which Mr. Chamberlain had not yet replied. You 
yourself (p. 50) allege — erroneously of course — that Krug- 
er's "new suggestions were put forward on August 12." 
Do you venture to> pretend that an answer had been sent 
before August 26th? 

Not satisfied with that perversion of the facts, you say 
(p. 51) that when the Transvaal Government returned their 
answer of September 2, "it was short and uncompromising 
* * * The negotiations were at a deadlock. It was dif- 
ficult to see how they could be re-opened." Every one of 
these statements is false. The reply was not uncompromis- 
ing. The Raad had agreed to the proposal for a Joint 
Enquiry, which Mr. Chamberlain had on Mr. Kruger's ap- 
peal agreed to leave open. The negotiations could with per- 
fect ease have been re-opened by reverting to< the Joint 
Enquiry. 

You actually have the folly to go on to say (p. 52) that 
"the British Government, however, was prepared to accept 
the five years' franchise as stated in the note of August 19, 
assuming at the same time that in the Raad each member 
might use his own language." I can hardly call this mon- 
strous figment a lie; it seems too> fatuous to be calculated 
prevarication. But the man who penned it is no more fit 
to write history than to< command the fleet. The literal fact 
is, as I have stated, that the British Government positively 
rejected the conditions attached to the Boer proposals. Your 



34 

ridiculous narrative makes out that the only final ground of 
dispute was the claim to let both languages be used in the 
Raad! 

As if this were not enough you proceed to state that 
the Transvaal Government's reply of September 16th was 
"unbending and unconciliatory" and "a complete rejection 
of all the British demands." Here it is hard to regard your 
utterances as one of mere folly. You have utterly perverted 
the facts. The Boer Government, finding their proposals 
rejected, appealed once more, as I have said, to the British 
Government to revert to< its own proposal for a Joint 
Enquiry. It was in flat disregard of this appeal, and of its 
own declared program, that the British Government pro- 
ceeded, as you admit, to break off negotiations, and to hatch 
its ultimatum. 

The Boer Preparations. 

Thus to the very last you grossly misrepresent the real 
state of the negotiations, and then you plunge at a step into 
your treatment of the war as a fatality forced on by the 
Boers ! Your crowning untruth — I can use no milder term, 
and I might fitly use a stronger — is your assertion that at 
the "deadlock" alleged, "in view of the arming of the burgh- 
ers, the small garrison of Natal had been taking up positions 
to cover their frontier." It lies recorded in our own Blue- 
book (Cd. 44, p. 22) that on September 19th the Natal 
Premier declared : "The Boers have not been commandeered 
yet." On the same page of the same Blue-book is the avowal 
that the first news of the commandeering of the Boers was 
received by the Natal Governor on September 28th, whereas 
he himself, having learned the tenor of the British reply to 
the Transvaal, had on the 24th decided to move troops to 
Glencoe, knowing that such a movement would be taken by 
the Boers as a declaration of war. 

The British Menaces. 

I have called this last perversion your crowning fiction 
in this connection. But perhaps I should reserve that title 
for your assertion that as late as September 8th, while the 



35 

forces in Africa had necessarily to be strengthened, "it was 
very necessary not to appear to threaten or to appeal to 
force." Not to appear to threaten ! When our own agent at 
Pretoria had officially and explicitly threatened it on August 
15th! When our War office had in June issued its manual 
of instructions for war in South Africa ! When Mr. Cham- 
berlain (with your avowed approval) had virtually threat- 
ened it on August 26th ! 

Amateur Historical Method. 

So far as I am aware, you have thus far produced the 
most worthless, the most careless, the most faithless, history 
of an important international episode that has been published 
in our time. And for this performance, it appears, you have 
been elected an honorary member of the Nova Scotian His- 
torical Society. Doubtless that Society's reseach has been as 
scrupulous as your own. 

The details which I have given, and which confute your 
narrative at every essential point, have not been left buried 
in Blue-books. For that matter, it was your clear duty to 
ransack the Blue-books with the most anxious care. But 
every item in my synopsis had been already published in one 
or other of the many treatises which have dealt with the 
subject in the past few years. I have simply collocated them 
in a single viewi for the benefit of your readers. I can hardly 
doubt that you are practically without knowledge of many of 
the details you falsify. That is, however, no excuse for your 
conduct ; and all the while you yourself show that you have 
no faith in your own record ; for on the top of it you affirm 
that during the negotiations the Boers were zealously prepar- 
ing for a war of aggression, If you believe that to be true, 
you were merely wasting time in your bogus history of the 
negotiations: a proved design of aggression by the Boers 
would of itself justify our planning to meet them. In reality 
you are but seeking to buttress a tottering structure of fig- 
ments by a fresh figment. With that fresh figment I shall 
now proceed to deal on its merits. 



36 

V.— THE ALLEGED DUTCH CONSPIRACY. 

More Loaded Dice. 

In the first chapter of your book you commit one of your 
customary falsifications by stating (p. 16) that under the 
Sand River Convention "the Transvaal Republic came form- 
ally into existence," and again (p. 22) that in the Conven- 
tion of 1884, "their style was altered from the Transvaal 
to> the South African Republic, a change which was omi- 
nously suggestive of expansion in the future." It is neces- 
sary to 1 explain to your sorely-tried readers that "the South 
African Republic" was the official title of the Transvaal 
State from 1852 onwards; that its constitution under that 
title was framed in 1864; that in the Convention of 1881 
it is called "the Transvaal Territory," which was never its 
Boer title, the Boer signatories being at the same time styled 
"representatives of the Transvaal Burghers" ; and that in 
the Convention of 1884 occur both the styles "Transvaal 
State" and "South African Republic." 

Thus do you load your dice from, the start. Had you 
so much as glanced into> Theal's "History of South Africa" 
you might have read in the very index that the "South Afri- 
can Republic" had its independence guaranteed by the Brit- 
ish Government in 1852. Your object is, of course, to insin- 
uate that from 1884 onwards the Transvaal Government was 
bent on aggression. Yet even at this stage, in your heedless 
way, you unwittingly reveal that the spirit of aggression 
was really on the British side. "Can it be wondered at," 
you ask, after discussing the settlement of 1881, "that South 
Africa has been in a ferment ever since, and that the British 
Africander has yearned with an intensity of feeling un- 
known in England for the hour of revenge?" I ask your 
readers to^ note that avowal. And I ask them further to 1 note 
how you forget and stultify your own words when in your 
fourth chapter you argue that "Majuba may have rankled 
in our memory, but was not allowed to 1 influence our policy." 
By your own account it was in South Africa a motive of 
overwhelming strength; and at every stage in this dispute 
the push to' strife has come from South Africa. 



37 

The Claim of Suzerainty. 

In this connection you discuss the claim to "suzerainty," 
saying that "the British" (you mean the Chamberlain) "con- 
tention is that it was not abrogated, and that the preamble 
(of 1881) held good for both treaties." Thus is the honor 
of the whole nation to> be tarnished because you see fit to 
endorse the most rascally expedient of modern diplomacy — 
a device which Sir Edward Clark in the House of Commons 
described as a breach of national faith ; which even Sir Alfred 
Milner deprecated, and concerning which Lord Salisbury has 
indicated his view by officially avowing in the House of 
Lords that Mr. Kruger made "considerable territorial and 
other sacrifices" to have the claim of suzerainty cancelled in 
1884. 

After gratuitously saddling the nation with the chi- 
canery of Mr. Chamberlain you proceed to avow that "the 
discussion is a barren one." You do your leader injustice. 
His treacherous plea has been as fruitful as Milton's Sin, 
bringing forth sword and fire, war and abominable desola- 
tion, shameful passion, and immeasurable hatred. Give him 
his due ! 

The Shibboleth of Paramountcy. 

It is doubtless quite consistent on your part to explain 
later, with regard to the discontent of the Outlanders, that 
"every Briton knew that Great Britain claimed to be the para- 
mount Power in South Africa"; but your readers are en- 
titled to ask what the phrase means, You write as if a "par- 
amount power" were a normal institution in every continent. 
What is it ? Is there a paramount power in Europe, in Asia, 
in North or South America? The United States do indeed 
insist that no European power shall intervene in the affairs 
of American States. Does that make them a "paramount 
power"? If so, they are paramount over British North 
America. If not, Britain is not paramount in South Africa 
in any sense save that her colonies are the most powerful 
States there. The veto on foreign alliances with the Trans- 
vaal is the one semblance of "suzerainty" left by the Conven- 



38 

tion of 1884; and by the repeated admissions of Conserva- 
tive statesmen — including- Lord Derby, Mr. W. H. Smith, 
Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Balfour — that veto carries abso- 
lutely no right of interference in the internal affairs of the 
Transvaal. 

The Boer Armaments. 

So* much for your preliminary mystifications: we have 
always to see to those in dealing, with you. Let us come 
to' your main proposition (p. 48) : "For three years the 
Transvaal had been arming to the teeth * * * evidently 
for war with Great Britain, and not for a defensive war. 
It is not in a defensive war that a State (sic) provides suf- 
ficient rifles to arm every man of Dutch blood in the whole 
of South Africa." Your style mates your matter : you mean, 
not that the number of rifles would be excessive in any 
State, but that it was excessive in the case of the Transvaal. 

On its merits, your arguments is as usual utterly falla- 
cious. If the Boers were to be duly armed in advace for a 
defensive war with England, they had need to> provide rifles 
and ammunition far in excess of their numbers, simply be- 
cause they had to import every weapon and every cartridge, 
and knew that in time of war they could import none, while 
England, having command of the sea, could supply her 
troops ad infinitum. 

British Aggression. 

For the rest, I need not remind any one save those who 
are simple enough to take you for a just historian, that 
while you swaggeringly affirm an "evident" design of the 
Boers against England the historic fact is that England had 
actually annexed the Transvaal in defiance of its own treaty 
pledges ; that Mr. Rhodes and his colleagues had engineered 
the Raid ; and that Mr. Chamberlain, instead of repudiating 
Mr. Rhodes' s treacherous act had officially vouched for 
his perfect honor. Will you suggest the name of any civil- 
ized neighbor of England which would not have armed in 
self-defence under such circumstances ? 



39 

The Case Surrendered. 

After all, you give away your own plea with your usual 
wisdom. "It is extraordinary," you exclaim, "that our 
authorities seem never to> have contemplated the possibility 
of the Boers taking the initiative"! Is it extraordinary? 
On your premises it certainly would be, but your premises 
are got by putting as a fact a figment framed only after 
war had been forced on the Boers, and they had showed an 
unexpected power of resistance. The Natal Ministry knew 
infinitely better than you ever did or ever will the disposi- 
tion of the Boers ; and they were all along satisfied that the 
Boers would not move till they saw us moving against them. 
They turned out to be perfectly right. Not till our troops 
were advanced towards the frontier, after the Boers had been 
told that they would receive an ultimatum which was to be 
backed up by armed force, did they send their ultimatum; 
and not till three days later did they invade us. 

No Evidence : Abuse Plaintiff. 

Every one of these facts is a matter of documentary de- 
monstration. For your contention, on the other hand, there 
is not a scrap of evidence worthy of the name. You accord- 
ingly proceed in the fashion of your party to make out your 
point by sheer swagger. The Dutch design to pull down the 
British flag in South Africa, you say, "was openly advocated 
in the press, preached from the pulpit, and sustained upon 
the platform." For this wholesale assertion you offer not 
a citation, not a reference, not a name. At the same time 
you admit that the South African authorities who must have 
known of such a propaganda, had never any apprehension 
of a Boer attack. 

The facts being all dead against you, you fall back on 
brazen asseveration. "The preparation for war, the ultima- 
tum, the invasion, and the first shedding of blood, all came 
from the nation which the result has shown to be the 
weaker." If such pleas are to become current with posterity 
as the deliberate reasonings of the British people, we shall 
simply pass for a nation of knaves. As the chronological 



40 

synopsis decisively shows, it was England that put the 
pressure, refused compromise, used the threats, visibly pre- 
pared to enforce them, took rapid steps to that end, and so 
drove the Boers in simple self-defence to send their ultima- 
tum while the English ultimatum was being got ready to 
present at the bayonet's point. The meanness of the bully- 
ing is merely enhanced by the pretence that it was the small 
nation which played the bully. 

Bogus Evidence. 

Instead of offering some semblance of proof for your 
vast assertions concerning open Dutch propaganda, you fall 
back on two trivial rags of bogus proof of secret designs — 
rags out of which the infinitesimal virtue had been long ago 
wrung by the desperate clutches of your party's press. 

First you take the testimony of Paul Botha, ex-member 
of the Free State Raad, who< calls Messrs. Sauer and Merri- 
man "Kruger's henchmen." Your deliberate adoption of 
this caitiff's scurrilities saves me some ceremony from this 
point forward. I noticed while in South Africa that the 
average loyalist, while professing to' hold all Boers for liars, 
always gave a fatuous credence to* a Boer who was agreeably 
deceiving him, or to a Boer who had turned renegade. You 
are attainted with this moral malady, or a worse. 

Had you been guided by the instincts of a gentleman, 
to which you sometimes make referencce, you would have 
realized that to call Messrs. Sauer and Merriman "Kruger's 
henchmen" is mere ccmaillerie; and had you preserved any 
sense of the value of evidence you would have seen that for 
Paul Botha to make such an infamous charge without offer- 
ing a grain of proof was to put his character at once out of 
court. But to gratify your partisan malice you join your 
voice to Paul Botha's, basely aspersing as paid traitors men 
who have grown grey in loyal statesmanlike service to the 
British Empire. An impudent renegade Boer has become 
your ideal of a "straightforward" witness. I wonder what 
estimate will be placed on your own testimony henceforth 
by "impartial" readers outside of this country? 



4* 

Comic Opera Evidence. 

After Paul Botha, you bring forward the other familiar 
puppet, Mr. Theophilus Schreiner. It is certainly hard on 
that muddle-headed gentleman to put him on the same plat- 
form with Paul Botha. But folly such as his is apt to get 
a man into- trouble, and you parade his folly to the full. 
He narrates, with every circumstance of ineptitude, eighteen 
years after the event, a conversation which he professes to 
have had with Mr. Reitz at the time of the formation of the 
Afrikander Bond; and you quote him verbatim. The gist 
of the testimony is that Mr. Schreiner imputed certain anti- 
British objects to the Bond, and that Mr. Reitz significantly 
smiled. I can well believe that Mr. Reitz smiled at anything 
said by Mr. Theophilus Schreiner. If you had done nothing 
worse than cite this rediculous report of an ancient conver- 
sation not noted at the time, a smile might have been your 
sufficient meed also. 

Dr. Doyle's Personal Research. 

Keeping strictly to business, as is now meet, we come to 
your special and individual contribution to the Dutch con- 
spiracy myth. You have made the most momentous asser- 
tion without one jot of relevant proof, and you have added 
to the offence of baseless assertion that of citation of obvi- 
ously base and as obviously idle testimony. This you cap 
with a piece of burlesque — the comic opera evidence of Mr. 
Theophilus Schreiner. But you have a final stroke in store, 
worthy of your cause, of your context, and of your method. 
You tell us that you found in a deserted Boer farmhouse a 
letter dated June 25, 1899, of which you give us a copy, 
italicizing the following words : 

"Dear Henry, the war are by us very much. How is it 
there by you. News is very scarce to write, but much to 
speak by ourselves." 

You say that this was written "when the British were 
anxious for and confident in a peaceful solution," and you 
seriously point to it as "evidence of that great conspiracy, 
not of ambitions, for there was no reason why they should 



4 2 

not be openly discussed, but of weapons, and of dates for 
using them,, which was going on all the time." 

There is a sort of humiliation in having to' expose such 
folly. You admit that the letter does not discuss ambitions 
when it easily might, and you infer that it has reference to 
a "conspiracy of weapons and of dates for using them" ! 
This — with one more letter, in which one Snyman avows a 
month before the war that "on the stoep it is nothing but 
war, but in the Raad everything is peace" — this is your case! 

The Brief Rebuttal. 

A sentence may make an end of it, for any who still 
need to have it answered for them. Weeks before June 25th 
the British War Office had issued its manual of directions 
for South African war; Lord Wolseley had urged his plan 
for the conquest of the two> republics; Sir A. Milner had 
called for a "striking proof" of British supremacy; and the 
Bloemfontein Conference had come to* nothing; and more 
than a month before the war began our agent at Pretoria 
had explicitly threatened war; Mr. Chamberlain had virtu- 
ally threatened it in a public speech; Sir A. Milner had de- 
clared that "British South Africa is prepared for extreme 
measures" ; and several of our newspapers had despatched 
their war correspondents. Your evidence is farcial ; your 
alleged facts are falsities; your reasoning is refutable by a 
child. 

The British Conspiracy. 

Exit the Dutch conspiracy. But the answer to your 
tissue of folly and fiction does not end with exposing its 
fraud. Your egregious reasoning not only puts in the shade 
the procedure in the case of Bardell versus Pickwick : you 
have contrived to eclipse the immortal action of the Wolf 
versus the Lamb. The final shame is that while the Dutch 
conspiracy is a British fiction, there was all the while a 
British conspiracy. It lies on the face of the chronological 
summary I have already given ; but six paragraphs will for- 
mulate it. 



43 

1. Mr. Chamberlain actually proposed to follow up 
the Raid by forcible intervention, and was reluctantly dis- 
suaded. 

2. He and Sir Alfred Milner began the pretence of 
general Dutch disaffection at a time when Cape Colony had 
given the most signal marks of loyalty. 

3. At a time when the Transvaal was altering its fran- 
chise at a rate never seen in English politics, they denounced 
President Kruger for the slowness of his action. The whole 
period from the Raid to the war was under four years. No 
English movement for extension of franchise ever succeeded 
in four times that period. And it is current doctrine with 
your party that no concessions should ever be made to "dis- 
loyal" agitation. 

4. Mr. Chamberlain's most insolent provocation was 
offered on the inspiration of a disgraceful message from the 
Outlanders, calling for the disarmament of the Boers. 

5. When there was no expectation whatever of a Boer 
attack, the War Office had published its plan of invasion; 
and when Mr. Chamberlain, refusing arbitration, rejected 
the most liberal proposals of Mr. Kruger, he also refused 
to go back to his own scheme of a Joint Enquiry, though he 
had agreed to leave that open. 

6. Half-a-dozen speeches by representatives of Rand 
capitalism avow that control of Transvaal taxation and leg- 
islation will greatly increase their revenues ; and Sir Walter 
Hely Hutchinson, in a despatch which alone will suffice to 
disgrace the nation with the historian of the future, urged 
in the middle of September, 1899, that a war with the Trans- 
vaal was desirable in the interests of Natal, since the former 
State had it in its power to injure the chief source of Natal 
revenue by favoring traffic on the Delagoa Bay line or that 
of the Free State and Cape Colony. 

The British Bluff. 

The last argument of your party, when their policy is 
exposed, is to ask whether our Government can be supposed 
to have desired a war for which they were so ill-prepared. 
Let such arguments be reserved for fools : from intelligent 



44- 

men they can meet nothing but derision. The simple and 
sun-clear explanation of the Chamberlain-Milner-Rhodes 
policy, with all its duplicity and insolence and fatuity, is that 
the plotters meant to invade and did not expect to be effectu- 
ally resisted. 

It is indeed literally true that they "did not want war" 
— least of all such a war as they have had. They wanted 
a walk over; and, deceiving others, they were themselves 
deluded enough to> believe that they would have one. That 
is the history of the negotiations in a nutshell; and when 
your unhappy pamphlet has gone the way of all rubbish, so 
will the history be written, to the shame of the nation of 
whose present majority you are the mouthpiece. 

VI.— THE ETHICS OF THE WAR. 

As your case is substantially destroyed by a simple re- 
cital of the negotiations, a criticism of your book might there 
fitly leave it. Since its texture, however, is of a piece 
throughout, and its effect on every important issue is to mis- 
lead mischievously you ill-informed readers, I propose to fol- 
low you to the end. Under the present head we have to 1 con- 
sider four topics discussed by you : 

i. The British refusal to arbitrate; 

2. The alleged Boer "annexations" ; 

3. The Peace Negotiations ; 

4. The Prospect of Settlement. 

These disposed of, it will remain to> discuss only the 
conduct of the war, under the heads of ( 1 ) Farm-Burnings, 
(2) Concentration Camps, and (3) Charges of Outrage on 
both sides. 

1. Refusal to Arbitrate. 

"That the British refused to arbitrate," you say (p.65), 
"has been repeated ad nauseam, but the allegation will not 
bear investigation." Then you go- on to show that the state- 
ment is perfectly true. Your case is that there are some 
subjects which can be settled by arbitration, and some which 



45 

cannot. Concerning those which can, you say Britain was 
willing to arbitrate before a tribunal which, as you sketch it, 
would be composed chiefly of British African officials! We 
are now well prepared for what follows. Without shame, 
you avow (p. 65) that Britain refused to go to arbitration 
before outsiders because if she asserted the Transvaal "be- 
came ipso facto an international State." Now, the sole treaty 
restriction on the Transvaal's action was with regard to 
foreign treaties. Whether Britain arbitrated or not on other 
issues, that restriction would subsist. Thus your plea is one 
more endorsement of iniquity. Had we accepted arbitration, 
the Tranvaal would have remained on exactly her formal 
status under treaty. The simple truth is that the refusal to 
arbitrate was by way of backing up the fraudulent claim 
to "suzerainty." In pursuit of that lawless and lying claim, 
the British Government incurred the guilt of a horrible war ; 
and in that guilt you are now as far implicated as words can 
carry you. 

You cite Milner to the effect that "vou cannot arbitrate 

J 

on broad questions of policy any more than on questions of 
national honor." That is to< say, we can never arbitrate on 
any question on which it would be worth while to fight : we 
can arbitrate only on trifles ! Solvuntur tabula. 

2. The Alleged Boer Annexations. 

In describing the first Boer invasion of our colonies, 
you asert (p. 73) that "every yard of British territory which 
was occupied was instantly annexed either by the Transvaal 
or by the Free State. This is admitted and beyond dispute." 
I have to reply, first, that "this" is on the contrary an ex- 
ploded fable. It has been disputed a score of times; and it 
is not true. While at Aliwal North, Cape Colony, in July 
of 1900, I obtained a copy of the proclamation that had been 
issued by Olliver, the commander of the invading Free 
Staters. It said not a word of annexation, but simply 
proclaimed Free State martial law. My copy was stolen in 
course of post in England, doubtless by some sympathiser 
of yours; but the historical fact is "beyond dispute" as I 
have told it. All that Sir A. Milner could do to discredit it 



46 

was to cite some unauthorized Boer utterances, never con- 
firmed by the Boer Governments, claiming to annex occupied 
territory. 

3. The Peace Negotiations. 

As usual you seek by such mystification to prejudice 
your readers against the Boer appeals for peace. Yet even 
here you stultify yourself. You cite Dr. Leyds as saying in 
January, 1900, that the Boers would "probably demand" 
certain cessions of coast territory in Natal, and of frontier 
territory in Cape Colony. This shows, you say, that they 
were not in "any moderate spirit." But had you not through 
a whole chapter been telling us that they wanted to' oust us 
from South Africa? The very words you cite, uttered at the 
highest point of Boer success, point only "probably" to a de- 
mand for some slices of territory. Out of your own mouth 
are you confounded ! 

4. The Prospect of Settlement. 

Had we, after victory, demanded both territory and 
indemnity from, the Boers, there would have been some 
point in your citation from Dr. Leyds. But you go< on to 
claim that his words justify us in annexing the whole of 
the Transvaal and the whole of the Free State. Your 
absurdity becomes as monotonous as your perversity. "Is 
there any sane man of any nation," you blatantly ask, "who 
could possibly have taken any other view" than that of the 
necessity for annexation! If you think no sane man does, 
why, in the name of elementary commonsense, did you write 
your pamphlet ? Was it to convert lunatics ? 

The answer to your folly is that the sanest men of every 
nation pronounce the policy of annexation insane. You 
throw off, with your banal facility, a paragraph of declama- 
tion about settling the question once for all. The answer is 
that your policy has made settlement well-nigh hopeless ; and 
that as far as historical judgment can foresee it has deter- 
mined the ultimate severance of South Africa from the 
British Empire. 



47 

Literary Statesmanship. 

You give us once for all the measure of your faculty 
for practical statesmanship when you write (p. 80) : 

"Whatever the final terms of peace may prove to be, 
it is to be earnestly hoped that 40,000 male prisoners will not 
be returned, as a matter of right, without any guarantee for 
their future conduct. It is also much to be desired that the 
bastard taal language, which has no literature and is almost 
as intelligible to a Hollander as to an Englishman, will cease 
to be officially recognized." 

If I were Dr. Leyds, I think I should say to you : "Fight 
it out, I beseech you, on that line. Your judgment is on a 
par with your accuracy. The taal is a good deal more intel- 
ligible to a Hollander than is the language of many districts 
of England to an educated Londoner, to say nothing of the 
taal of two^ millions of east-end Londoners. But pray con- 
tinue. Keep 40,000 men prisoners for life, or exact from 
them an oath which they regard as extorted by oath-breakers. 
Make their proscribed language the symbol and incarnation 
of their trampled nationality. So shall you settle South 
Africa !" In my own person I should say : If England is to 
be guided by you, she will not long have an empire to mis- 
rule ! 

Fresh Falsifications. 

Some of your readers, I fancy, will be glad to come 
quickly to the central issue. You narrate the negotiations 
between Lord Kitchener and General Botha, and you finally 
say : "Nothing has been refused the enemy, save only inde- 
pendence." Your own narrative gives the lie direct to your 
assertion. You actually print verbatim the article of the 
final offer which refused amnesty to Botha's Colonial allies. 
That was the main ground on which he could not accept the 
terms. No honorable soldier could possibly consent to sac- 
rifice his allies, knowing that many of them were likely to be 
put to death, as a number of prisoners already had been. 
What is more, you quote the very sentence which shows that 
Lord Kitchener on his own part had not wished to ask of 



48 

Botha what he, as a soldier, never would have consented to 
in Botha's place. These are Lord Kitchener's words, in his 
account of the first negotiations : 

"Tenthly. — Amnesty to all at end of war. We spoke of 
Colonials who joined the Republics, and he (Botha) seemed 
not averse to their being disfranchised." 

Lord Kitchener, then had suggested only their disfran- 
chisement. And you have the effrontery to pretend that 
Botha's final decision was "not determined by any changes 
which Chamberlain may have ( !) made in the terms." 
Doubtless there are fools who are capable of believing you, 
and proud you must be of their proud suffrages ! 



VII— THE CONDUCT OF THE WAR. 

i. Farm Burning. 

Your chapter on this head asserts or implies (i) that 
guerilla methods entail harsh measures, (2) that Lord Rob- 
erts prevented farm-burning and looting in the early stages 
of the war, (3) that our troops were blameless, and that "it 
was as much as his life was worth" for a soldier to capture 
a chicken on the march into the Free State, (4) that the 
Boers did unjustifiable things in Natal, (5) that when we 
began burning farms it was always because our troops had 
been fired at on farms of which the houses flew the white 
flag, (6) that nevertheless we did unjustifiably burn some 
250 farm-houses, mostly belonging to men whom we had 
forced to take the oath of neutrality, but whom we did not 
protect as we ought to have done. 

Confessions and Professions. 

It is refreshing to find you making a partially rational 
and candid admission. Had such a thing come earlier in 
your book it might have prejudiced some of us in your favor. 
I let it stand as the one redeeming passage in your treat- 
ise. But for the rest your sixth chapter is on your normal 
plane. Near the close, you assert that "the burning or 
houses ceased in the year 1900, and, save in very special 



49 

instances, where there was an overwhelming military neces- 
sity, it has not been resorted to since." This is one more 
untruth. Letters from the front have been repeatedly pub- 
lished, testifying that systematic farm-burning took place 
in many districts after 1900. Your "overwhelming military 
necessity" is part of your habitual verbiage. 

Laws of War and Lawless Conquest. 

The outstanding absurdity of your case here is your 
tacit assumption that we are entitled to demand observance 
of "the laws of war" from an enemy whose country we 
declare we are going to keep. You appear to think in rdl 
seriousness that we can demand compliance with inter- 
national law from an enemy whose nationality we deny to 
be any longer in existence! 

It is in A^ain to seek to bring you to reason, but I have to 
point out to readers that when we negate the nationality of 
the Boers they are no longer amenable, as against us, to any 
international law. They will, doubtless, observe the usages 
of war for their own sakes, but to complain as you do of 
their resort to guerilla tactics is to relapse into imbecility. 

There are no "laws of conquest." No nation ever 
admitted that there could be. Laws of war are conventions 
agreed upon between States who expect to end a war by 
a treaty of peace between the combatants as States. If 
there is to be no Boer State, there are no laws of war for the 
Boers. 

The Guerilla Principle. 

Your remarks on guerilla warfare, in connection with 
German practice in France, are merely ridiculous. The 
Germans shot guerillas because it was open to the French 
Government either to fight on regular lines or to sur- 
render on terms which did not annihilate the French State. 
Between the German case and ours there is no parallel what- 
ever. I need only remind your readers further that when 
Napoleon's generals in Spain denounced the guerilla tactics 
of the Spaniards, the Duke of Wellington expressly refused 
to admit that there could be any limit to the right of a peo- 



5o 

pie to defend its national existence. To quote, again, the 
words of a recent and distinguished English Imperialist, 
Sir John Seeley : "To the right of self-defence there is no 
limit." Your argument is a peurile sophism. 

The First Farm-Burning. 

Next as to your facts. Out of your own mouth, once 
more, I confute you. 

i. In your own history, "The Great Boer War," p. 
202, you have put on record that long before Roberts' 
march through the Free State, farms had been burned by a 
flying expedition belonging to the division of Lord Methuen. 
Was that record false? 

2. Your citation of Lord Roberts' early declaration 
against farm-burning is thus doubly idle. As to early loot- 
ing, your language is beneath serious notice. No man 
from the front can read it without laughter. 

3. But the critical reader will not be turned aside from 
the true issue by your rant concerning the impeccable pro- 
priety of the troops. I have here nothing to do with the 
conduct of the troops, or even with that of the commanders; 
It is the contemptible tactic of your party to try to turn the 
question of national policy into a question of the army's 
character. You thus lash up the passions of both fools and 
ruffians, hoping in the noise to evade the difficulty. Your 
device will not serve you here. We are considering the 
military policy resulting from the policy of annexation; and 
alike for chance individual wrongs and systematic devasta-- 
tion the guilt lies at the door of the British Government and 
of the majority that backs them. In that majority you have 
deliberately enrolled yourself. 

Boer Depredations. 

You quote the characteristic letter in which Lord Rob- 
erts met the first Boer complaints by saying that "all wanton 
destruction or injury to peaceful inhabitants is contrary to 
British practice and tradition," and then, as you say, "car- 
ried the war into the enemy's country" by charging certain 
misdeeds on the Boers. Now Lord Roberts was here both 



5i 

right and wrong. The Boers did loot unjustifiably in Natal. 
I have repeatedly heard the admission made on their side. 
And why should you be surprised? Have you not been 
showing us that they were semi-barbarians, utterly in the 
rear of civilization? Had not your press been calling them 
brutes and ruffians before the war began? Had not the 
press of Natal been calling for the "extermination" of the 
stock? Your and your friends' shriek of protested amaze- 
ment at their first acts of looting is a fair sample of your 
habitual insincerity. 

Depredations by Kaffirs. 

On the other hand, Lord Roberts' letter charges on the 
Boers the looting and wrecking of the farm of Longwood, 
near Springfield, Natal. This I have elsewhere shown to be 
a myth. When in Natal in September-October, 1900, I 
took pains (rather more, I fancy, than you have taken over 
any point in the history of the war) to find the facts in this 
matter; and I found decisive evidence that the damage had 
been done by local kaffirs. The wife of the owner, proceed- 
ing solely on angry inference, had charged it on the Boers ; 
her letter was circulated in a Blue-book; and Lord Roberts, 
making no proper investigation, endorsed her statements. 
This is a fair sample of how your type of mind confuses all 
history. 

Of the value of Lord Roberts' official assertions the 
same letter gives another test. He writes : "It is reported to 
me from Modder River that farms within the actual area 
of the British Camp have never been entered, the occupants 
are unmolested, and their houses, gardens, and crops remain 
absolutely untouched." Now I have elsewhere published 
an affidavit by a Cape Town attorney who lived at the Mod- 
der River in November, 1889, telling how his property was 
plundered and damaged by our officers and forces. I men- 
tion this to explain why I put aside your whole official 
parade of British virtue. It is neither here nor there. The 
fact remains that both sides early committed depredations : 
the question is, What is to be said for our being committed 
to a policy of universal ruin ? 



52 

Wrecking our Colonies. 

That policy has two phases. As against the unques- 
tionable looting done by the Boers in Natal, wholesale loot- 
ing and destruction was soon done by our own forces on the 
farms of our own Dutch colonists. This was partly by way 
of lawless colonial revenge on our own Dutch for the deeds 
of their kindred; largely by way of martial law; partly by 
way of the random plunder and wrecking that accompanies 
all warfare. The facts have been pretty fully put on record, 
and you are, of course, careful to say not a word about them. 
We used to talk of the process of "Burke-ing" evidence; 
henceforth we may with propriety talk of Doyle-ing it. 

The effect of thus plundering, insulting, imprisoning, 
and impoverishing hundreds of Dutch farmers in Cape 
Colony and Natal was to shake allegiance which had survived 
the shock of the wanton creation of the war. On the top 
of this policy of ruffianism and stupidity, in which colonial 
loyalists and the British authorities went hand in hand, 
come the policy of making a wilderness of the Free State 
and the Transvaal. The first process you ignore : the second 
you defend. 

Wrecking the Boer States. 

To begin with, you repeat the pretence that the first 
resort to systematic farm-burning was in punishment of 
abuse of the white flag. But in one sentence you unguard- 
edly betray the falsity of that pretext. You admit that about 
May, 1900, certain farm-houses were burned on the score that 
"while a white flag was flying from the houses, the troops 
were fired upon from the farmsteads." This is not perfectly 
clear : but it hints of the fact, which is, that in certain cases 
there was shooting on farm lands on which the farm-house 
flew the white flag. 

As you must be well aware, though, of course, you do 
not mention it, there is no reason to believe that in these 
cases the Boer combatants had anything to do with the farm- 
house. Boer farms are of great extent, often ten miles in 
one direction, and containing hills of large size. It might 
well be that the firing party could not even see the farm- 



53 

house, and vice versa. Now, all the land of the Boer States, 
save the townships, was parcelled in farms and fighting 
could not take place except on farms. It comes to this then, 
that our policy — I put it thus, not condemning Lord Roberts 
— involved our denial of any white-flag protection to non- 
combatants dwelling in farm-houses anywhere. 

Secondly, our policy involved the decision by Lord 
Roberts to destroy all farm-houses within a given radius 
of any spot where an attempt was made to destroy the rail- 
way or telegraph lines, no matter whether the residents were 
non-combatants or neutrals. That is to say, the policy of 
annexation involved the utter devastation of every district 
where the Boers conducted military operations. 

From that point it was but a step to the decision that 
wherever the Boers could get supplies or temporary shelter, 
the district must be wholly devastated. In fine, the policy 
of annexation has involved the absolute devastation of the 
entire area of the two Boer States, save in the small portions 
effectually held by our forces. 

Annexationist Ethics. 

And now you have the audacity to tell us that because 
our policy is one of conquest we are justified in unlimited 
devastation! You conclude your chapter by saying that 
guerilla warfare "is a two-edged weapon, and the responsi- 
bility for the consequences rests upon the combatant who 
first employs it." Not to put too fine a point upon it, your 
contention is an insolent absurdity. The responsibility for 
guerilla warfare rests upon the combatant who, by decreeing 
the annexation of a formerly independent State, forces such 
zvarfare on its people. That is the initial and fundamental 
crime. Your defence is a house of cards. It proceeds on 
the assumption that conquest for annexation, for the utter 
annihilation of a State as such, is a process recognized by 
international law. It is the definite negation of all inter- 
national law; and the process of justifying it is a virtual 
negation of the bases of all morality. 

This is what your party's policy has brought us to — 
open iniquity of doctrine, the definite substitution of the test 



54 

of might for the test of right. For the nation to come to 
that, there was necessary a progressive atrophy of the moral 
sense. In your tissue of false narrative and fraudulent 
argumentation we can scientifically trace the process. 

2. The Concentration Camps. 

If you had the courage of your thesis, you would pro- 
ceed, not to whitewash the Concentration Camps, but to 
claim that we are entitled to massacre all the women and 
children. Why not? Is it not "necessary for our purpose?" 
Many loyalists in the colonies have said so : English journals 
have suggested it. Mr. Swinburne, said to be our greatest 
living poet, has in an interval of sobriety poetically alleged, 
under the tolerant auspices of the Saturday Review, that no 
other power than England would have spared such "dams 
and whelps." 

But such consistency staggers you, and you proceed to 
show that the Concentration Camps were at once necessary 
and creditable to us. It is one of your most pleasing demon- 
strations. There were three courses open, you say : ( i ) "to 
send the Boer women and children into the Boer lines — a 
course which became impossible when the Boer army broke 
into scattered bands and had no longer any definite lines"; 
(2) to leave them where they were; (3) to concentrate them 
in camps. 

First Thoughts. 

Concerning the first course you thoughtfully omit to 
mention that we did dump down the women and children 
at the Boer lines as long as we could. It was a noble, a 
humane, a Christian and a gentlemanly policy, inherited 
by us in due course from our knightly Norman ancestors. 
A French artist has painted a bad but awakening picture 
of the procedure in the case of the great siege of Chateau 
Gaillard, when the chivalrous defenders turned out their 
"useless mouths" and the chivalrous beseigers kept them at 
bay between the castle and the camp, the living eating the 
dead, till all were slain by cold and hunger and disease. It 



55 

is thus clearly a function of "the laws of war" to take women 
and children from their homes and use them to starve out 
their combatant relatives. Whatsoever things are base, 
whatsoever things are brutal, whatsoever things are cow- 
ardly, whatsoever things are iniquitous, these may we joy- 
fully endorse under that mystic formula. 

Clearly it was necessary. That is the beauty of the 
situation. We have only to decree annexation of an enemy's 
country, and then everything that will help to crush the 
resistance becomes legitimate. "The laws of war shall make 
you free." As we cannot reduce the resistance by fair means, 
we are clearly bound to try foul. 

Facts on the Veld. 

Unhappily, as you note, the Boers ceased to have 
"lines" ; and British taste in the main, like your own, still 
deprecated massacre. We could not leave the women and 
children on the veld, you say, "in the presence of a large 
Kaffir population." Strange! I thought we had left them 
on the veld for some time ! I chanced to be in Cape Colony 
when the earlier devastations were being wrought ; and from 
our own people I heard stories such as that of a humane Eng- 
lish General (I shall not name him, lest it should make him 
unpopular with your majority) meeting a starving family 
group on the veld and feeding them, while from the Dutch I 
heard of Kaffirs feeding desolate Boer families in their huts 
— a thing regarded by Putch people with unfeigned surprise. 

The Theory of the Camps. 

It turns out then, that Kaffirs — whom you thus in one 
page picture as dangerous beasts, while elsewhere you de- 
scribe them as the hapless victims of the Dutch — are not so 
black as they are painted by either Dutch or Rhodesites. On 
the other hand, it happens that the Camps were not quite so 
philanthropically planned as you make out. The first scandal 
about these institutions was that Boer women and children 
were there imprisoned in bad sanitary conditions when their 
relatives in Cape Colony offered to feed them. I have myself 
published an official missive which expressly refused to let a 



56 

Boer woman go to her relatives in Natal because the men of 
her own family were on commando. The dictionaries do 
not yet, unfortunately, recognize such a policy as pure phil- 
anthropy. 

The Supply Trains. 

You go on to speak of "the extraordinary spectacle'' of 
"the British straining every nerve to feed the women and 
children of the enemy, while that enemy was sniping the 
engineers and derailing the trains which were bringing up 
the food." Why then did not the British send those women 
and children south? The answer is a little too simple for 
your purpose. The food of the camps came with the food 
for the troops. There is a limit to British philanthropy ; and 
to remove the camps south of the theatre of war would have 
been to withdraw a serious check to the Boer resistance. As 
before, the women and children had to be used to "drown the 
war." Our "purpose" requires it. 

I will not ask whether you have forgotten that there 
appeared in the Times of October i, 1901, a letter from a 
favored correspondent, who let out the circumstance that the 
Boers let pass certain supply-trains because they carried food 
for the camps. If you had had the letter before you you 
would not have mentioned it. Of some arguments you can 
see the bearing. 

The Sins of the Lamb. , 

Your perceptive powers, however, are precarious. In 
one passage (p. 97) you repeat the interesting statement that 
"the defects in sanitation are due to the habits of the in- 
mates." On the same page, vaguely conscious that this will 
hardly do, you virtually confess that the prevalence of dis- 
ease in the camps, "like that enteric outbreak which swept 
away so many British soldiers," is "beyond our present sani- 
tary science, and can only be endured with sad resignation." 
But of course you could not delete that chivalrous aspersion 
of the victims ; and you bethink you to repeat that other ex- 
quisitely plausible story that "children died of arsenical pois- 
oning, having been covered from head to foot with green 



57 

paint." It is thus happily established that, whatever other 
supplies may run short, our authorities keep the Boer fam- 
ilies abundantly supplied with rations of arsenical paint ! 

The Logic of "Admissions." 

Perhaps, however, you are at your best when you deal 
with Miss Hobhouse' s report. In one sagacious paragraph 
you say she "reduced her whole report to nothing" by saying, 
"they [the camp authorities] are, I believe, doing their best 
with very limited means." "What more," you ask, "can be 
said" ? Well, one hesitates to grapple with such sainted sim- 
plicity of appeal, but perhaps some of your readers may 
appreciate the suggestion that if the camps are starved the 
guilt finally lies at the door of the British Government, with 
its ingenious policy of necessity, and of yourself and the rest 
of the acute moralists who support them. If it should chance 
that a whole camp were starved to death, British officials 
included, nobody, on your theory, could be blamed — except 
of course the Boers. 

Miss Hobhouse, then, as other people were able to 
understand, was indicting the general policy and manage- 
ment, not aspersing the camp authorities. I surmise that 
after all you did manage to see as much, and that it was on 
that score that you produced your monumental refutation : — 

"The value of her report was discounted by the fact that 
her political prejudices were known to be against the Gov- 
ernment. Mr. Charles Hobhouse, a relation of hers, and a 
Radical member of Parliament, has since then admitted that 
some of her statements will not bear examination." 

This passage at least of your pamphlet the world will 
not willingly let die. Your party must regret that they had 
not the skill, in past years, to point to the destructive admis- 
sions made by the late Mr. Gladstone's Tory brother as to 
his shortcomings. Your use of the term "Radical" is pecu- 
liarly artistic: so subtly obscures the fact that Mr. Charles 
Hobhouse supports the Government's war policy. 

The Boomerang. 

But there are drawbacks to such dialectic. I have 
before me the United Irishman of January 25th, in which 



53 

there is a review of "Conan Doyle, his book." Among other 
things worth your attention the reviewer, an ex-Johannes- 
buger, says : — "Mr. Doyle has sent me a copy of his book 
for my opinion. My opinion, belief, and conviction about it 
is that it is a lie. He falsifies history, he suppresses truth, 
he distorts facts." And he goes on to give a good deal of 
evidence to that effect. Now, supposing that Irish Outlander 
and reviewer chanced to be a relation of yours — such things 
have happened — would his "admissions" on your behalf be 
held to have special weight? You so frequently appeal to 
the standards of "gentlemen" that one is curious to know 
how you solve such problems. 

A Few Official Facts. 

When all is said, three substantial circumstances in 
regard to the camps stand unchallenged. One is your own 
avowal (p. 26) that while the camp diet in a given case is 
"a spare one," the allowance "may, however, be supple- 
mented by purchase/' That is to say, there is more food 
available for those who can pay for it. So that either Miss 
Hobhouse had been a little too charitable in her judgment of 
some of the camp authorities, or the higher authorities had 
directed them not to do their best with the means at their 
command. 

The second fact is that, by express official order, the 
wives and children of men on commando were served with 
smaller rations than were held requisite to maintain the 
health of other refugees. A pleasing proof at once of our 
official philanthropy ("no money was spared" is your modest 
allegation on p. 95), and of the proposition that the fighting 
Boers are the cause of their own families being in concentra- 
tion camps. 

The third circumstance is that, unfortunately for you, 
the commission of ladies sent out by the Government report 
even more discouragingly about the camps as did Miss Hob- 
house. Their prejudices, you know, were carefully seen to 
before they were appointed ; yet they declare, in contradiction 
to yourself, that sufficient care has not been taken to choose 
suitable sites; and that in some camps the officials have 



59 

tended to sink "to a low standard of order, decency, and 
cleanliness in sanitary matters." In fine, where camps are 
properly placed and properly fed, there is no excessive death- 
rate. In many of the camps there is a juvenile death-rate 
so dreadful that, to the annoyance of your party, all Europe 
cries out. And the only show of rebuttal you can make, as 
apart from bluster, is the citation of testimony from inhabi- 
tants of the more fortunate camps to the effect that they have 
nothing to complain of. 

The Guilt. 

I had better explain finally that I discuss these facts not 
in the least by way of laying responsibility on either the mili- 
tary or the medical authorities in South Africa. It is you 
and your friends at home, learned sir, that I arraign — you 
who preach annexation and call it policy. And if there are 
"Radicals" among you I should like to leave on record my 
opinion that they are the worst hypocrites of you all, inas- 
much as they profess to make the right of self-government 
the first article in their political creed, and go about to de- 
stroy the rights of other men. The war will not be without 
its small mercies if it should purge Radicalism of such. 

The Acceptable Evidence. 

But I must not omit to notice the personal aspect of 
your argument in this matter. "With the best will in the 
world," you say of Miss Hobhouse, "her conclusions would 
have been untrustworthy, since she could speak no Dutch, 
had no experience of the Boer character, and knew nothing 
of the normal conditions of South Africa." You have thus 
in advance convicted your chosen Government of the inepti- 
tude of sending out to Africa, to investigate the camps, a 
number of ladies who, in the nature of the case, could come 
only to untrustworthy conclusions, their disqualifications 
being the same as Miss Hobhouse's. 

But you, learned sir, how much Dutch do you know, 
and what is the extent of your knowledge of the Boer char- 
acter ? 



6o 

It is presumably on the strength of your qualifications 
of that kind that you claim our acceptance of the evidence 
of "Mr. Dudley Keys, a surrendered burgher," who writes 
to his brother, for one thing, that "all of us who have surren- 
dered are fully aware of the fact that we are the aggressors, 
and that our statesmen are to blame for our present predica- 
ment," and for another, but 

"Some of our women would tell her [Miss Hobhouse] 
anything for a dress or a pair of boots. If she knew our 
coutrymen and women as well as we know them, her story 
would have been a short one." 

This, as usual, is the sort of evidence that satisfies you. 
It has a natural affinity to your mind. A Boer renegade who 
is base enough — or, looking to his British blood, let us say, 
a naturalized Boer who is malevolent enough — to asperse 
Boer men and women in the lump as venal liars, this is your 
chosen witness. We are never to believe a Boer who fights 
for his country; we are always to believe a renegade, and 
the fouler-tongued he is the better. Wbt right have you 
now to reject any British charge against Britons? You have 
set up a standard of testimony which I fear will give you 
trouble. 



VIII.— THE RECIPROCAL CHARGES OF OUT- 
RAGES. 

With that standard in view, let us take up your con- 
cluding chapters. You see I have not included this topic 
under "the conduct of the war" : it seems to me to deal pri- 
marily with the conduct of the British and foreign press and 
public. My own unsophisticated view, based on much mili- 
tary and other testimony, is that vile things are done in all 
wars. That is one of my reasons for loathing war, and for 
failing to esteem those who, like yourself, whoop for it as 
a school of "virtue." You, I gather, are sometimes of my 
opinion that outrages are "inevitable" in war; but as usual 
you are infirm in your conviction. 



6i 



Boer Sins. 



You are convinced, I gather, that the Boers have com- 
mitted the vilest outrages, especially since they have been 
fighting for their national existence. Since you wrote that 
the war was over, and they inconsiderately refused to cor- 
roborate you, they have, it would appear, shot Kaffirs, and 
brained little Kaffir children — thus jeopardising their rifle- 
butts when they might so easily have painted the victims 
green! — they have shot already wounded men who were 
seeking quarter ; they have taken the money and the watches 
and private papers of their prisoners (instead of recipro- 
cating the notorious generosity of our own troops in these 
matters) ; and they have even told ugly stories against our 
side. 

Why the Surprise? 

I confess here to distinct embarrassment. 

First of all, what did you expect from those back-veld 
people, "lying right across the line of industrial progress," 
who so wickedly conspired to drive the British Empire out of 
Africa? On the other hand, now that you have reluctantly 
come to see them as the monsters they are, why are you still 
so wildly anxious to have them for fellow-citizens? If you 
could only sometimes contrive to be plausibly consistent, it 
would simplify the process of argument. 

Suzerainty and Slander. 

But putting those difficulties aside, there remains this, 
that while you find it necessary to the happiness of your 
party and yourself to vilify the Boers, you are ostensibly 
astonished that they and their European sympathisers should 
vilify you and the British army. May I ask where you were 
brought up? Is there really a spot in these islands, or any- 
where else, where scurrility and slander do not breed scur- 
rility and slander? Your party began libeling the Boers 
with their whole power of mendacity long before the war 
began. They trumped up among other things a series of 
ante-war outrages so ludicrously incredible that even you, 



62 

I notice, have omitted to recite them in your book. From the 
beginning of the war it has rained lies against the Boers. 
You yourself once noticed this, declaring that many anti-Boer 
stories were calumnies. On what grounds, then, as a man of 
science or of imagination, as a novelist or as a physician, are 
you surprised that there should be calumnies per contra? 

The Case Altered. 

It is not only apparent calumnies that infuriate you. 
You are angry with Mr. Stead because he quoted published 
letters of British private soldiers in which they exultantly 
told how they bayoneted men kneeling for quarter. "Such 
expressions," you say, "should be accepted with considerable 
caution" — the soldier may be merely gasconading. But 
when the soldier accuses the enemy of outrages — then, oh 
then ! no caution is required ! And when a renegade calls 
all his nation beggarly liars, his evidence is unimpeachable — 
so long as he comes from the other side ! 

You apparently become conscious here of your own 
absurdity, for you proceed to confess that "such instances 
[of refusing quarter] could be found among troops in all 
wars." Why then leave standing your first denial? And 
having been twice absurd, why go on to urge against Mr. 
Stead that to found a general charge on a particular case 
"is unjust in the case of a foreigner, and unnatural in the 
case of our own people" ? Mr. Stead never argued that A = 
B to Z. It is you and your party who take that line. No 
Briton ever supposed that all Britons were ruffians. But 
your party are usually much occupied in making out that 
all Boers are — see the extracts made by Mr. Methuen from 
your standard journals — and you are doing your best to 
help them. You seriously cite, as above noted, cases in 
which the Boers take the money of their prisoners, as if that 
were not the constant practice on our own side. By such 
methods, you simply work deceit. You speak again of the 
Boers' "callous neglect" of enteric patients among their pris- 
oners at Pretoria, as if that very charge had not been made 
at Cape Town itself. In short, you work up your pamphlet 



63 

to a final crescendo of aspersion and denunciation of the 
enemy; and all the while you are indignant that aspersions 
and denunciations return! 

The British Monopoly. 

Where, pray, do you expect your curses to roost? Is 
suzerainty to imply the subject's duty to be silent when vili- 
fied ? You seem to desire, as one of the privileges of empire, 
a sort of Billingsgate millennium, a monopoly of maledic- 
tion, for the Anglo-Saxon race — I beg pardon, I ought to 
use your term, the "Anglo-Celtic," you being one of those 
"Celts" who bow before Lord Salisbury's kick at the "Celtic 
fringe," and humbly beg leave to join the caste of the kickers. 
You may call the sacred race what you will, but I fancy you 
will have to endure yet awhile the reciprocation of insult and 
injury. It is no doubt very vexing: "Majuba" apparently 
rankles still — witness Lord Kitchener's recent despatch. 
But you cannot have both the triumph of perpetual crowing 
and the tribute of silence from the other dunghills — at least 
until you have annexed them. 

Justification by Precedent. 

With your inveterate inconsequence, you think to repel 
calumny by justifying every official act of the war. "To 
derail a train," you say, "is legitimate warfare" — after this 
you have inadvertently recorded how certain rebels have 
been executed as "murderers" for derailing trains — "but to 
checkmate it by putting hostages upon the train is likewise 
legitimate warfare, with many precedents to support it also." 
This you pretend began in October, 1901, and you say there 
has not been "a single case of derailing" since. You are 
perfectly aware that Lord Roberts began the practice in 
1900, using as "hostages" men who surrendered to him on 
his proclamation ; and that after a time he desisted because of 
the outcry. You are also aware that there have been 
attempts at derailing since October, 1901. 

But let the case be as you say. If we are quite justified 
in putting non-combatants on trains to protect us from the 
enemy, why are you so surprised at the story that we once 



6 4 

used Boer women as shields? You speak of "precedents" 
as sufficient justification. Are there not plenty of precedents 
in war for the most abominable acts? Why not simply cite 
Weyler as giving us our precedent for concentration camps 
where the inmates cannot be fed, and there make an end? 
Why be surprised if, when you wage a war of devastation 
to achieve annexation, you are accused of following other 
"precedents" of conquest? 

From Thorns, Grapes? 

But if it comes to that, why be surprised at anything 
from Boers? From people who will tell any lie for a pair 
of boots — as certified by your valued witness, Mr. Dudley 
Keys — what should come but untrue anecdotes about their 
veracious suzerains? Having demonstrated with the help 
of Mr. Keys, their universal baseness, why wonder at their 
persistence in it ? As for the pro-Boers, having once proved 
by the congenial voice of Paul Botha that Messrs. Sauer and 
Merriman are "Kruger's henchmen," need you be surprised 
that, even as some pro-Boers think you no more gentlemanly 
than you should be, some should think British generals in- 
humane ? 

The Foreign Tribunal. 

To be sure, there are slanders circulated among the 
other nations of Europe ; and it is a little awkward to suppose 
that they are all as bad as the Boers. You consider them 
misled — a hypothesis which raises the wonder whether that 
might conceivably ever happen to the British nation. But 
the facts broadly stand thus. Our journals have within a 
year published a round dozen of what were later proved to 
be absolutely false tales of outrages by Boers — for instance 
that about the wounded English doctor whose brains were 
beaten out with a stone. For these inconceivable lies no 
apology is ever made; nobody is ever punished; and new 
lies are always on the cards. At the Cape, one hears them 
every day ; and the loyalists, so furious at anti-British calum- 
nies, never boggle at the anti-Boer phenomena. Where then 
is the wonder that people on the Continent, hating a war of 



65 

confiscation, and regarding the very purpose as an iniquity, 
should in their turn believe that it is vilely carried out? 
Have you forgotten that the Boers are ethnologically 
"Anglo-Saxons," the Dutch people being, of all sections of 
the "Teutonic race," the most closely akin in speech to our 
noble selves ? And if it is so certain that the Boers commit 
the outrages you recite, why should the intelligent foreigner 
hesitate to believe that Britons do similar things? In view 
of the Irish policy of your party, is he likely to suspect that 
you consider the "Celtic" to be the ennobling element? 

Boer, Briton and Native. 

To bring the matter to an end, I will put to your readers 
three points. Firstly, there is the case of Scheepers, a Boer 
leader who is declared by British witnesses to have repeat- 
edly behaved with chivalrous kindness to his British prison- 
ers, and who has been executed on a charge of "murdering" 
natives. I think it not impossible that in this war the Boers 
oehave at times with cruel injustice to natives : that is a 
tendency they have thoroughly in common with Mr. Rhodes 
and many other Britons. The last is the important point 
here. 

As you must be aware, there has been tried in our courts 
at the Cape a case in which a certain trooper was charged 
with shooting dead a native at a farm near Colesberg. The 
trooper pleaded that his captain had ordered him to shoot 
the native if he did not at once find a commandeered bridle. 
The native could not find it, and was accordingly shot dead 
after a few minutes. The trooper, having acted under orders, 
was acquitted. The captain, who attended court under a 
safe conduct from Lord Roberts, went scot free. No more 
wicked murder could well be committed by any Boer, and the 
crime goes absolutely unpunished. 

Is it then to be supposed that foreigners will believe for 
an instant in the good faith of a judicial system which uses 
such balances as these ? And are they any more likely to be 
impressed by the good faith of a writer who, while justifying 
the execution of rebels, justifies also the execution of Boer 
prisoners for shooting natives whom they regard as rebels? 



66 

That sort of thing is bad enough to begin with; but when 
you add to it the general charge of "the continual murder 
of inoffensive natives, some of them children/' it would be 
interesting to know on what grounds you expect to escape 
the epithets you cast, and the kind of stories you tell. 

Explosive Bullets. 

You make it a charge against the Boers that they use 
"explosive bullets." The very word is a falsehood to start 
with : there are no explosive bullets in use anywhere. What 
you had in view were simply expansive bullets, though you 
speak of "expansive and explosive." You are aware, all the 
while, that the Boers got those bullets from ammunition 
stores captured by them from us. Then you explain that our 
expansive bullets were intended only for "practice in field 
firing" ; and that "by some blundering in the packing at 

home, some of Mark IV must have got mixed up 

with the ordinary or Mark II ammunition," and were so used 
in battle; but that when this was discovered the expansive 
bullets were withdrawn. 

I can imagine how you and your party would have 
treated a statement of this kind if made by Boers. I may 
quote the words of Lieutenant de Montmorency, in his letter 
of 9th February to the Daily News : "If anyone were to tell 
me that the large stores of Mark IV ammunition which were 

at Dundee were meant exclusively for practice, I 

should refer them to his Majesty's Royal Horse Marines." 
But, further, I would ask your readers to note Lieutenant 
de Montmorency's statements ( 1 ) that, after the withdrawal 
of Mark IV, the soldiers "used to file the points of their solid 
bullets, hoping so to improvise expansive bullets," and (2) 
that officers used expansive revolver bullets. (This avowal 
was made to me by officers in South Africa.) 

In view of all this, the net effect of your attempt to 
impeach the Boers will simply be to heighten the British 
repute for hyprocrisy all over the world. You have to admit 
that England and America refused to condemn expansive 
bullets at the Hague Conference, and you comment that "in 
taking this view I cannot but think these enlightened and 



6; 

humanitarian Powers were ill-advised." Your moderation 
is exquisite when you are dealing with British deeds; but 
some of your readers can imagine how foreigners will appre- 
ciate the contrast set up by your language towards the other 
side. 

Iniquity Sitting in Judgment. 

But your crowning stroke in the way of iniquity is your 
denunciation of the Boers for not wearing uniform. You 
say their practice is "entirely irregular as regards the recog- 
nized rules of warfare," citing the first article of the Con- 
ventions of The Hague. The Boers, you say, "were the 
invaders; and in view of their long and elaborate prepara- 
tions" they could easily have furnished their burghers with 
"some distinctive badge." Thus you ground your protest 
on the Hague Conventions. All the while you are aware 
that the British Government insisted on excluding the Trans- 
vaal from the Hague Conference; and you yourself have 
justified the exclusion, on the score that we could not allow 
the Transvaal to rank as an independent State ! 

So it comes to this, that the Transvaal is to be de- 
nounced for not observing one of the minor rules of warfare 
laid down by a Conference from which we insisted on 
excluding her, while we have deliberately broken many of 
the main rules, including those forbidding the bombardment 
of undefended buildings, pillage, looting, extortion of oaths, 
forcing the people to act against their own countrymen, con- 
fiscation of private property, and infliction of general penal- 
ties for individual acts. All the while, the British army has 
abandoned the use of "badges" about as completely as the 
Boers ! 

L'Envoi. 

Thus do you add the reek of a persuasive hypocrisy to 
the flavor of perversity which exhales from your treatise. 
You have done your best to inculcate on the British people 
the new commandment of Imperialism, "Do unto others as 
you would not that they should do unto you" ; and you think 
to mend matters by accusing our victims of a lack of consci- 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



68 



019 920 656 4 

entiousness. It is in the name of the national honor which you 
and yours have trodden in the mire, of the national watch- 
words which you have "soiled with all ignoble use," of the 
ideals of justice and humanity which you have shamed and 
defied, that I take leave to testify to other nations that this 
country is not wholly given over to your standards or your 
practices, and to impeach before our own people the tissue 
of untruth and unreason by which you seek to debauch them. 
Against the slanders of foreigners they have an open way 
of remedy — the ending of an act of international iniquity. 
From defamation they will never escape by your device of 
libel, any more than they can make an empire out of races 
whom they have taught how to fight them no less than how 
to hate them. Least of all will they escape by your peurile 
method of telling the Germans that henceforth they can 
count on no help from us in their wars. You thus contrive 
to make us ridiculous where already your party had made 
us odious. It is about time our neighbors were told that you 
and your party are not the nation. 



Hollinger Corp. 
P H8.5 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



019 920 656 4 • 



